


Lambing Season

by HelloAmHere



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Comfort, Escapism, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff, I don't know how to tag that, M/M, animal destruction, emotionally abusive work interactions, farm au, it's mild, nothing but, some not graphic animal husbandry around lambing??, taking care of sad boys, unrealistic farming details
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-18 19:54:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16125575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAmHere/pseuds/HelloAmHere
Summary: “Shut up,” Louis says, an involuntary grin tugging at his mouth. It’s not every boy who will stand in the middle of a cold barn in a suit and play musician trivia. “I’m Louis.”//lambing season brings sleep deprivation, noisy alarms, cold barns, demanding animals, and warm strangers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write some comfort, on this day of days, so here 'tis, the world's most fluffy and pastoral bit of farm fluff.

As usual it’s Agnetha who starts all the trouble.

Agnetha is an infinity of energy packaged down to a less-than-twenty-pound body. She’s a lady and a scamp, the ringleader of all the others, and an incorrigible destroyer of the electric fence. She’s the unholy offspring of Bjørn and Beethoven, two of Louis’ very most steady old reliables, who nonetheless managed to produce the most awful _ovis_ Louis has ever had to deal with and he’s had to deal with quite a few at this point.

She’s also his favorite. Those two things just manage to magnetise together so much in Louis’ life, _awful_ and _favorite._  

“Fuck,” Louis breathes, up into the chilly air. The curse immediately turns to mist. It’s criminal that it’s this cold when it’s supposed to be spring. But it is, and the ground crunches under his boots like cracked crystal. The night is clear, almost painful in its clarity, with stars that stand out vivid and bright against a deep sky that goes on forever. There’s _depth_ to the sky out here that Louis isn’t yet used to, even two years in and going on a third.  

“Fuck,” Louis says again, because he’s supposed to be in bed and he was intending on it after a long walk in the cold to stare morosely at the stars, a quick decaf tea and a podcast meditation at the kitchen table, and a melatonin pill, _carpe noctem,_ as one does. But then he heard Agnetha’s distinctive bleating, even across the distance of the long yard and the line of pine trees looming over the dirt and gravel drive. Usually he’d ignore it until his duty appointed lambing alarm, but it’s coming from the wrong part of the barn.

Louis trudges through the lingering wet and quickly-forming frost on the long grass. He hasn’t mown this part of the lawn since the previous summer, which is going to introduce chaos once it warms up, a haven for insects. He’ll have to bring the riding lawnmower out of storage from the second story of the barn. And is there still an owl nest in there? Do owls migrate in the winter? No, Louis has heard them out the window when he can’t sleep, freakin’ giant spectral birds of haunting. Owls. Baby owls are probably cute though. It’s been a wet spring that started warm and then snapped right back into cold. Louis’ hands are rough on the edges already, chapped and peeling around his fingernails from wet work and early lambing mornings.

It’s ok, though. It’s a sort of satisfaction. He never used to do anything with his hands, now there’s Agnetha and Benny and all the others, because of his hands. That’s cool, that is. He’ll have to get some of Liam’s cuticle cream from down at market, this Sunday. Liam’s Market is a bright spot of conversation in the otherwise silent week. Maybe Liam can bring out his shears. Louis needs a haircut and a shave and a conversation with somebody nice and easy like Liam. Lambing is almost done, only Joan Jett hanging on still waiting to pop. Louis has survived his first lone lambing season, and even though he knows everyone else in the far-flung farmland is just a phone call away, he’s got his pride and he hasn’t dialed anyone yet. That’s a sort of satisfaction, too.

Louis yawns as he walks. He needs a long, good night’s sleep. He needs to not be out here in the dead of a cold night, but he’s making it through.

He swings his lantern from his left hand, but he doesn’t bother to turn it on. Out here it’s far away enough from other people that the stars give him all the light he needs.

The barn smells good, like it always does. A good you have to be acclimated to, animal and earth, but in the cold the manure isn’t rank and the metal and stone comes out instead. The fresh hay is fragrant too. It’s a towering shipment that Louis had just gotten delivered two days before. It’s stacked in a shadowy long row in the middle of the stone barn, between the abandoned milking stations. It looks like a castle in the dark.

Agnetha is definitely out. Louis can hear her bleating little voice. She sounds smug.

“I swear to the god of fleece and fur, whoever that is,” Louis announces to the dark interior. “If you’ve let everybody out again, I’m gonna shear you before your time. I’m gonna sell you to Liam, and he’s gonna--I don’t know. Liam will probably just polish your hooves. He’s a gentle soul. Unlike _me,_ of whom you should be very afraid.”  

Agnetha’s bleat sounds again, muffled and maybe contemptuous.

“The god of fleece, that’s the half-goat one, innit?” Louis mutters. Maybe. Seems awfully specific though. Why should sheep get a god? It’s been a long time since the illustrated _Children’s Myths of Rome and Greece_ book that his mother used to read out loud at bedtime, and the farms have their own superstitions, undoubtedly. Fewer gods, more wiles of nature. The farms around here are too stoic for ancient myths, spirituality encapsulated in half-shoulder-shrugs and a glance at an overcast sky, like, _what can you do?_ He doesn’t know if the sheep ever feel spiritual. If the sheep have a god it’s not Louis, unless Louis is an undertaker sort, the one who got stuck in the forge with the anvil while all the other gods partied.  

“Gonna lose your mind out here, rambling to yourself,” Louis mumbles. It's a familiar refrain. Maybe it's his prayer.

It's still a better fate than the one he left. 

He tromps down the length of the barn and flicks on his lantern.

A long time before Louis took over the big farmhouse and the midsize pastures and loaned the further pastures out, there had been milk cows that lived here. The old stone dairy barn is still full of the remnants of what Louis privately thinks of as _real_ farming: industrial, high output, and whatever they did with those big pieces of iron welded to the ceiling and the floor that are too much a bother to take out, so they’re the silent observers of everything Louis does. His small sheep flock doesn’t really compare, and they’re dwarfed in the space, but hey. Who’s around to judge? Louis used to get bothered by it, especially in the first year, but now he’s used to feeling like he’s living in the past’s shadow. It feels like benevolent and detached judgment, like his grandmother when he told her that her brother had left him the place, and that he wasn’t selling it. That he was moving to it. _Takes a different sort to live out there alone,_ she'd said, as unreadable as she ever was, unblinking and unflawed over china as white as her teeth. _It's a different sort of alone._  

The gate that bars the interior animal stalls from the rest of the barn is still shut. The sleepy figures of the flock blink up at him in the lamplight. There's some crepuscular stirring from the hutch in the back corner of the open space too, but Louis pays it no mind. The _bunnies_ don't break the gates.

Louis sighs. “Just you then making a break for it, my sneaky love?”

Agnetha, invisible, bleats. She must have crawled through the gap between the mended gate and the feed trough, pushing the board out of the way. Louis frowns, and kicks at it. He’d thought the plywood could resist a stubborn lamb skull-butting, but he must’ve been wrong. 

He turns around and picks up the lantern. It casts a long alley of light on stone, hay dust floating in the beam. The old milking stations make long, eerie shadows.

“Where are you hiding,” Louis grumbles. There’s a tiny muffled bleat, and it’s coming from the haystacks. She’s probably snuggled in there. He hopes he won’t have to crawl into some dusty crevice; last time he did he got insect bites all down his back. Louis walks as quietly as he can down the middle cement walk, dodging a couple of hazardous disconnected light fixtures that still dangle from the ceiling. Those need fixing, dammit. Louis is in no mood to chase a bolting lamb around the inside of the barn fifty times and his nose is starting to feel like an ice cube. Plus—she could get hurt, running around here.

“Why you gotta do me like—” Louis is muttering, quietly, when he rounds the first wall of hay bricks and stops dead in his tracks, the words dying in his throat. 

There’s Agnetha, looking smug. She’s curled up in the hay, well, curled up _in the lap of a boy_ who is curled up in Louis’ hay, curled up with his back against a hay brick and his long legs folded underneath him, tucked into a well of space in the middle of the hay like a pastoral fantasy.  

The boy has his eyes closed. The boy— _who is in Louis’ barn, where no one is supposed to be—_ looks lightly asleep, like he’s too exhausted to stay awake but didn’t mean to doze off. He’s hunched into the hay and the ground, and there’s some loose hay on his thighs that bespeaks an effort to cover ineffectively against the cold. He’s got shadows under his eyelashes. He’s got a mop of curly hair, and long arms that are braced gently around Agnetha, who’s pleased with the whole situation. The boy is gorgeous, surreal, skin a little bit too pale

He’s wearing…Louis blinks, and blinks again. He’s wearing some kind of ridiculous suit. It looks silky in the lamplight. It’s got flowers and gold woven in some intricate pattern on the lapels, a run of fabric like a woman’s scarf coming down from a crisp white collar underneath. It’s blue and gold and pink. Agnetha is chewing on a button, a gilt, ornamental button on the cuff of the blazer sleeve. The boy is like a fairy, like an out-of-place fantasy with long features and a sharp jawline, chin falling down to his chest in a heedless roll of utter exhaustion. He’s a sculpture made up of fanciful crush material and an optimistic spring high fashion catwalk. He's _gorgeous._

There’s a curl drifting over his forehead. It’s a direct assault to Louis’ entire state of mind.

Louis takes a deep breath. “Who the FUCK,” he says, enunciating carefully, like it’ll help make the situation make any more sense—“Do you think. You. Are. What. Are. You. Doing.”

The boy startles awake in a bleary panic, jolting his head up and banging it against the hay. Agnetha bleats in protest. Louis notices that, even disoriented, he clutches the lamb in two big hands, carefully catching her and stilling his own movement.

“Oh,” the boy says. It’s a low, syrupy voice. He looks older awake, and he sounds older, Louis’ age, or close enough. He’s got heavy brows that give him a piercing look, like he’s sharp and perceptive when he isn’t halfway to unconsciousness in somebody’s barn in the middle of the night. 

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Louis snaps. His voice sounds grating and high in his ears. It sounds scared, which is irritating.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t mean any harm,” the boy says, slowly, like he thought Louis’ voice sounded scared, too. Louis grips his lamp tighter and holds it up between them.

“What are you doing in my barn? What are you doing with my _sheep?_ ”

Agnetha chooses this moment to tug aggressively at the sleeve. The boy glances down at her, and then back up at Louis.

“Nothing,” the boy says quickly, “Nothing, I promise, nothing.”

“Did Liam put you up to this? Is this a prank? This is my barn. Where were you even gonna _take_ the sheep?” Louis is shining the lamp right in the boy’s eyes, a bit rude but also it’s rude that they’re like this, shining and big and woeful.  

“Li—no? I promise, he just, he just came out. And I was like, lost in here, didn’t mean to bother anybody, but he came up and seemed friendly and honestly I was freezing so I just...I figured he lived here. My name’s Harry? I’m—I’m related to Jacob? Jacob Brin? He’s my cousin?”

“Jacob Brin, he doesn’t live here. This is _my barn,_ because _I live here._ ” Louis says, begrudgingly lowering the lamp.

“Right,” Harry says, nodding quickly, to emphasize that he’s not going to argue about it. Louis nods back, a little foolishly. He wills the defensiveness to settle back down around the base of his spine, where it likes to live. Harry’s an absurd beautiful boy who’s clutching a small farm animal in his lap; he’s not a hostile invader, not a threat to the farm.

“Right,” Louis says. “Want to tell me why you’re making my hay a Bed and Breakfast?”

He has a suspicion, though. It’s easy enough to get lost, especially if you’re taking a taxi in from town. The roads out here don’t even have names, just have a rural route number, and it’s six to one half dozen to the other if a smartphone navigation app will have ever been connected to a database that thought to include rural route numbers along with standard addresses. Plus Louis’ farm _used_ to be part of the Brin farm, back in family history that’s only murky in Louis’ mind.  

“Would be a vegetarian bed and breakfast, wouldn’t it, if its beds were made out of hay bales. Appeal to the hippie crowd,” Harry says.

“Oh, there’s owls,” Louis says, waving his hand. “Sometimes they drop mice down the shaft from the second story, maybe that’s the breakfast part,”

“Very Scottish,” Harry says solemnly.

There’s a half-second where they’re looking at each other and almost laughing before Louis catches himself, fallen unexpectedly into the rambling joke with this stranger, the moment a shot of warmth, too close and too natural. Louis presses his lips together.

“This is my barn,” Louis says. Maybe if he repeats it enough times, he’ll feel more secure. It’s been two years but it’s still a little ghostly. Half of him feels like Harry’s the strange city spirit he always thought would eventually manifest. Somebody sent by the family matriarchs and patriarchs to fetch him out of hiding. He's got to be from the city. _Ghost of Christmas Past,_ Louis’ mind helpfully supplies. _It’s SPRING,_ he thinks back aggressively. He’d had Christmas. He’d gotten Simon, for Christmas, and they’d taken a days-long hike in the back hills, and he’d come home and made a roast that languished as leftovers in his fridge until New Year’s.

“I know, and truly. I didn't mean to break in, just didn't know where to go, and it was the closest building around...” 

The boy looks truly miserable, plus he must be _cold._ Louis might be a misanthrope but he doesn’t exactly want somebody to freeze to death in his barn.  

“Are you ok?” Louis asks.

Harry waits for a much longer time than anyone who is actually ok waits, and then says, “Yes.”

Agnetha bleats. Agnetha hates a liar. They both look down at her. She’s three buttons in and eyeing the fourth.

“ _Gerrof_ the lost trespasser, you awful lamb,” Louis says before he can stop himself. Talking to sheep all day everyday, useless sheep-hassling has become his native language.

Harry smiles just a little. “He’s fine. I’m sorry for stealing your lamb, I sat down here and he came up. I tried the house, but it was all dark and I thought everyone had gone. I dunno, I thought Jacob had just--I don’t know him well, you know, and I was desperate to...well. I’m sorry. I can go, can you point me in the direction of Jacob’s farm? I’ll walk.”

Louis looks up at the ceiling, and then back down at Harry. This is more words than Louis is used to exchanging with another human. Harry looks pleading, tired, ridiculous. And the thing is that Louis knows what it looks like when a living thing is trying to project certainty, and direction, when they really don’t have one. He knows what the lost ones look like.

“What are you _wearing?”_ Louis asks. Louis is wearing what they all wear on the farms. A thick coat with a tough canvas exterior, jeans that his grandfather might as well have worn, boots that a cow could step on without breaking the foot inside.

Harry looks down at himself, then laughs, a little hysterically. Louis shifts from one foot to the other. If Harry’s a crazy fancy-dress murderer, he calculates that he’s got a head start on hiding in the dark maze of the barn. Harry’s got his lamb, though. That’s unacceptable. Louis can grab Agnetha and bop Harry on the head with the lantern. He can use the hay bale twine to tie him to a milking station and then Louis can go find the landline and use it to rouse Liam, who will definitely only wake up if you use the landline, with its old-fashioned, self-important tolling ring. In the farmland everybody knows to keep the landline by the bed, and answer it without question.

“Oh god,” Harry says, properly laughing now. He’s gorgeous and hysterical, his eyes crinkling up. They look red around the edges. He’s leaning a little bit over Agnetha. He must be _freezing._ “Oh god, I know, I must look like I came for a ball. I’m an idiot, right, this must all look insane, I promise I’m not, I just. I was supposed to come out here because I mean — I needed a break. Things were--well. Things were bad. I needed to get away. I called Jacob a month ago and he said, come anytime. And then this morning. I guess, I mean. Something happened and I, I just left, without even my whole head on. Left straight from work with what I was wearing.”

Jacob is Louis’ neighbor in the sense that he’s the next farm over, which might as well be a town away for all they have contact, but still. Jacob is a stalwart, grizzled farmer who seems as likely to be related to this over-dressed fairy tale character as he is to break out in song during the next annual harvest festival. Which is to say, not likely, because Jacob doesn’t say five words in a row if he can manage it. And definitely not to Louis, not that he's unkindly, it's just that in these parts when one is under fifty-five and birthed fewer than twenty animals one is considered brand new, and very breakable.

Louis swings the lamplight around the edge of the hay bale. There’s a single piece of airplane-ready luggage, with a fancy logo stamped on the hard leather frame. Normal people don’t have luggage like that--it’s custom, with finishings that Louis can recognize even though his sense about such things is notably rusty. It’s got a gold tag with _Harry_ written in offensively flashy cursive script. And a little jangly heart clipped into the same hook as the gold tag. That looks considerably less expensive than the whole rest of it, like a sentimental, cheap charm that somebody gifted a long time ago. The heart is incongruous, and beloved, and for some reason, that hurts.

“God, dammit,” Louis says. Pan, he thinks suddenly, _that_ was the half-goat one. The flipping satyr with music down his throat and mischief in his veins. Looks normal until you really look. Comes in with the spring, to bring a joyful devastation.

Harry is watching him, still crouched in the dirt of the barn. There’s a small, rueful smile on his face that makes Louis feel prickly up the back of his neck, like Harry knows the whirling weirdness of his thoughts, even though he couldn’t possibly. “Point me in the direction of Jacob’s farm and I’ll get out of your hair. Hay. You can have your lamb back. He’s precious. I love him. Thank you, for the shelter.”

Agnetha bleats, and kicks her left hind leg idly, in a lamby twitch. She loves this _Harry,_ she is a traitor. Harry looks like he could walk about a quarter of a mile at most. He looks like whatever he walks on should be a catwalk instead of the gravel-pitch mess of a rural route without a name.

Louis sighs. The deep, oppressed sigh of those who know what’s coming to them. _Ghosts and spring gods, then._ Never could be an uneventful lambing.

“She,” Louis says.

“What?” 

Louis sighs. He shifts the lamp from one hand to the other. Is he going to regret this? He’s going to regret this.

“It’s a she. The lamb’s a she, her name’s Agnetha. Come on, we’ve got to put her back. Get out of the hay, come on.”

He sees the flinch across Harry’s face. Maybe he wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been in lamplight, dramatic and monochrome in the shadow. Harry’s face shudders into resignation, his eyes dropping down and then back up again, his mouth tightening. 

“Ok,” Harry says quietly.

“Oh, no,” Louis says, suddenly feeling panicked, suddenly feeling like it’s very important to clarify this part. “Not throwing you _out_ , you’re going to stay in the house with me, at least until the morning and we can sort you.”

“What? Really?” Harry asks, like it’s too much to believe someone would have the decency to take him in. He’s really gorgeous, and maybe looking so lost makes him even more gorgeous. Louis doesn’t know if that’s fucked up. Probably--it would be in Louis’ style. But it doesn’t _matter,_ he didn’t seek it out this time.  

“Yes of course,” Louis says in a gentler voice this time. “Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t take you to Jacob’s in the middle of the night during a lambing, but we’ll go in the morning. You want to carry that awful beastie to the gate? She’ll kick up a fuss if you hand her off, probably.” 

“Awful beastie,” Harry repeats, in a quiet, fond little murmur to Agnetha. Louis keeps a close eye, sleep-deprived and wild-looking city boys being an unknown quantity. But Harry’s got enormous hands and he’s obviously very concerned about Agnetha. He scoops her up along his side with one forearm, and grabs the handle of the luggage with the other. Its wheels squeak absurdly on the stone barn floor. 

“All right,” Louis says, turning at the rail to take Agnetha.

Harry is taller than Louis expects. His legs have unfolded into something leaner and more masculine, too, but he has a gentle air that the outlandish suit is doing nothing for but enhancing. Louis should probably stop staring but he can’t. There’s a gold leafing run along the sleeves of the blazer. It looks expensive. It looks more expensive than any single thing Louis has in the house, at least this house. Louis is closer than he realized, just a hair’s distance, with Agnetha between them.

“All right?” Harry asks. His voice is slow, low, a little gravel of fatigue mixed into its sweetness.

Louis blinks himself back into reality. 

“Right,” Louis says idiotically. He pulls Agnetha out of Harry’s arms, drops her gently over the railing, and she saunters off in search of Bjørn. Louis drags a heavy feed bag over from the pile behind the trough and leans it against the board.

“Agnetha, you ruin my life,” he calls after her. There’s a tiny lamby bleat.

“They have names? I thought farmers weren’t supposed to give them names,” Harry asks. Absent a lamb to hold, he’s wrapped his long arms around his own torso. “Granted, the most I know about farms is like, Sesame Street.”

Louis tilts his head to the side. “Well, I’m not the most proper farmer,” he concedes. He looks over the railing and nods at the jumble of lambs, now tucked into each other in a great warming cuddle pile. It’s excessively adorable. “Sure, they have names. Your friend is Agnetha, on top as usual, she’s the boss. Twins with Anni-Frid.”

Harry blinks, endlessly pretty eyes. _He’s a stranger,_ Louis reminds himself, as if _that’ll_ do any good. “Did you name your sheep after ABBA members?”  

“No. What? Maybe. What’s it to you,” Louis says. It ends in a little bit of a growl. “And not all of them.” Louis adds.

“Well,” Harry says consideringly and very slowly, looking out over the fence as if he’s got to take an accounting of each individual sheep, “I guess there are only four in the band.” He’s shivering, Louis notices, his teeth setting into his bottom lip like he’s trying to not show it.

“What’s _your_ name? Benny?” Harry asks, startling Louis out of his observation a hair too late to pretend he wasn’t staring at Harry’s face.

“Shut up,” Louis says, an involuntary grin tugging at his mouth. It’s not every boy who will stand in the middle of a cold barn in a suit and play musician trivia. “I’m Louis.”

“Got a trumpet anywhere? Farmer musician Louis?” Harry asks. 

“You’ll have to wait until breakfast to find out. Come on, let’s get you inside, let’s get out of this night, sort you out in the morning,” Louis says, shrugging off his coat and holding it out to Harry. 

“Oh, you don’t have to,” Harry says.

Louis just rolls his eyes and shakes the coat. He’s a little uncomfortably aware that he’s wearing a faded green t-shirt that says _Farmers Do It In The Fields._ Liam had given it to him last Christmas and it already has several holes in the bottom, since Louis is surrounding by bitey mammals half the live-long day. Louis is uncomfortably aware of a lot of things, including that he feels gruff and awkward and tired, that this total stranger boy-man-fairy-person looks a vision even pulling Louis’ coat over an insane suit (is that a _bracelet,_ jangling on his wrist? Or a very fancy watch?), that Louis doesn’t like guests, certainly not if they’re strangers, and barely even likes it when Liam and Niall come over.

“I have a dog,” Louis warns. “I have dogs. Two dogs. If you try anything.”

This is true, he does have two dogs. They’re undoubtedly both curled up asleep in one great jumble in the kitchen right now: Simon, a rescue pitbull mix who trembles at his own shadow, Garfunkel, a stout corgi who eats like a garbage disposal and acts as Simon’s personal emotional support fellow-animal.

“I suppose murder would really bring the bed and breakfast reviews down,” Harry says weakly.

Louis glares at him. He doesn’t really mean to. It’s just his face.

“Got it, got it, no murder, only sleep,” Harry says, nodding fervently, hands up in a placating gesture. Sometimes Liam tells Louis that he’s got that _older brother glare, terrifying, especially when you need a shave and a sleep, it's like the whole world’s your little sisters._ “I promise, I won’t be any trouble.”  

Louis isn’t exactly sure why he doesn’t believe this.

***

“Don’t forget I have dogs, so don’t try anything,” Louis says as he walks them into the kitchen.

He stares at the backs of Harry’s shoes. They’re like strange fancy trainers, luxury logos stamped on the side, and they’ve gotten all wet from the frost outside. Louis felt bad leading Harry through the brushy path from the barn to the house but, he has a habit of checking the run of the fence on the way in to the house and he’s determined to not change anything just because a stranger has been taxi-dropped in the middle of his farm.  

“Oh my god, how could I possibly forget now that I’ve seen them, just look at them,” Harry whispers.

Simon and Garfunkel are asleep on top of each other in Garfunkel’s bed, which means that Simon’s hindlegs are spilling out behind him and his entire, enormous pitbull head is stacked on top of Garfunkel’s small, stupidly fuzzy one. They’re both snoring.

Louis sniffs. “Don’t be deceived by their current peacefulness,” he says.

There's something vulnerable, Louis thinks, about having to watch a stranger look at the awful, obnoxious, shoe-eating dogs that you wouldn't hesitate to die for. Simon is snoring, a little whistle coming out his nose like a petite steam train. Garfunkel's drooling. They're a little dirty, scruffy around the edges like Louis himself. There are scarred chunks out of Simon's ear, which Louis knows is still velvety soft but which apparently had made him seem “ _unadoptable_.” Garfunkel has bad knees. They're not designer dogs, not Instagram-sleek. They're needy and loud and flawed and alive.

Louis crosses his arms over his chest and gears up to _hate_ Harry, if he breathes a word of criticism in the direction of his rescue pups.

“What even is this magical place,” Harry says. “ABBA lambs that sit in your lap. The most perfect puppies in the world, in the kitchen.”

Harry’s got a grin on his face that he’s unsuccessfully trying to keep down. It makes his face look younger, folding cheeks that hint at dimples. He holds both hands up in the air, hands far out over Louis’ too-short coat sleeves, like it’s the only way to express his emotions.

“You really are from the city, aren’t you,” Louis whispers, looking away so that he doesn’t look relieved. Why should it matter? It doesn’t matter.

“You can meet them in the morning, city stranger. If I introduce them to you now, we’ll never get any sleep. And you look like you need it,” he adds, scanning over Harry’s face now that Harry’s looking back at him. It’s hard to tell in the dim kitchen light, but his eyes are too red around the edges, and anyone who falls asleep knees-up in hay has got to be going through something on the stressful side.

“I’m fine,” Harry says, looking away. It’s another lie, but then again he’s a stranger, so. Louis shrugs. He steps out of his boots with a yank at the mudroom without bothering to unlace them. Harry follows suit with a questioning glance, his body movements hesitant and tentative. He leaves the trainers neatly side-by-side at the wall.

Louis doesn’t turn on the lights in case it wakes the dogs, plus there’s a hutch for Elvis in the living room because he’s still healing from some digestive issues and Louis moved him inside to keep a closer eye on him. Elvis is getting on in rabbit-years, a hearty seven, but he’s still capable of thumping all through the night if he thinks Louis is up and about and reprehensibly not feeding all bunnies immediately. 

There’s a second bedroom, up a solid wooden staircase that his grandmother’s father built by hand. The railing has an elegant curl at the bottom that Louis has always felt proud of. He leads Harry up in the dark, feeling strangely like a teenager, sneaking someone in at night. Not that anybody had been watching much, when Louis had been a teenager. Not that anyone's watching now. It's just them, and Louis is hyper aware of every move that Harry makes behind him.

He flips the light on the second bedroom and Harry trails in after him. It’s a square, sparse room, but like everything in the farmhouse, it’s well built with clean corners and thoughtful woodwork around the windows. It has yellow walls and lace curtains, and there’s a quilt hung up on the wall that Louis resolutely doesn’t look at, because it’s going to make him feel awfully like the old farmer character to Harry’s prince, in the storybook.

“Hope your jacket isn’t ruined,” Louis says.

Harry makes an uncaring, breathy noise. The jacket’s missing buttons and he’s definitely got hoofprints on his slacks.

“Thank you for saving me,” Harry says again, like he feels the need to keep doing that.

“Don’t worry about it,” Louis says. “Jacob will probably have to come help me during shearing now, so it all evens out.”

“Very economical, taking in bedraggled strangers that you don’t know from Adam, should consider expanding the bed and breakfast for rescue missions,” Harry says.

“Well it’s a barter system out here. One long-lost city relative saved means I get to demand one long afternoon getting sunburned holding down wriggling sheep,” Louis says.

“Always wondered how many sheep I’d be worth,” Harry says. They grin at each other before they both look away, Louis frowning. There it is again, that flood of warmth between his ribs like an unexpected hot spring.

Harry’s got an even better jawline under a proper light. Louis squints at it automatically. Maybe it’s fake? Is that a thing, fake jawlines? Harry’s stifling a yawn.

“Bathroom attached,” Louis says, waving a hand. “No one’s been in it for...I dunno. Since Liam got drunk last harvest and had to sleep over, probably. But there’s clean towels, even if they’ve been clean in there for the last six months. Please feel free to shower. Extra flannels at the end of the bed, too.” 

Harry nods. Louis nods back. God (and his panpipes), this is awkward. Louis notes that he is feeling overly solicitous, and that this is a tendency he’d hoped that two-going-on-three-years alone had stamped out. He wants to sit Harry down and make sure he falls asleep, maybe heat him up some warm milk with cinnamon and make sure he showers. Get him out of those dumb beautiful clothes and into something warm and rustic and probably hand-woven. He’s an idiot.

“Sleep tight, strange city boy,” Louis says, backing out the door.

Harry gives him a little wave over his luggage. “Sleep tight, strange sheep farmer.”

Halfway down the long second floor hallway to the master bedroom, Louis realizes that he’s left his coat in with Harry. But he doesn’t have any idea how to go back for it, so he doesn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

Louis’ alarm goes off an hour and a half after his head hits the pillow. 

He’s been changing the alarm in a ploy to make the wakeup less terrible. It is not effective. At least it makes it more novel, such that he startles awake in more of a panic than he would if it were the usual chimes. This time it’s _Dancing Queen,_ in keeping with the seasonal naming inspirations. The alarm starts on the chorus, just to be extra terrible.

Louis slaps his phone off the table and then rolls out of bed to find the phone and shut it off properly. Was the synth always that bad? Late at night in the company of a white wine, which was when he set it, he was sure it was a resplendent chorus. Now it’s tinny and irritating, worming into his skull.

“Uuugh,” Louis says, blinking in the light of his phone screen. It’s two am: up and at ‘em, then.

He shuffles through pulling on jeans and boots with minimal cognitive functioning. The farmhouse is as the farmhouse ever is--still, silent, around him like a heavy draft horse taking a snooze. The farmhouse is a _presence,_ and Louis hasn’t quite figured out whether he’s earned that presence, even now a few years into it. So it’s not until he’s clomping halfway down the stairs with a flashlight that he hears the second bedroom and remembers-- _fuck--_ that there’s somebody else in the house.  

“Is everything ok?” Harry asks, poking his head out the bedroom door and whispering, like they’re in danger. He looks like he’s showered, and he looks wide-eyed and startled. He’s clutching the handle of his luggage, like he’s going to need to book it out of the house.

“No, no, everything’s good,” Louis says. “Sorry to wake you, crap. It’s just lambing season, you know?”

Harry looks confused. Louis shakes his head. Of course he doesn’t know. Stupid.

“I have to get up every few to check on the last ewes,” Louis explains in a throaty whisper so they won't wake the dogs, who will wake Elvis, and then it'll be a proper commotion of things that want food. “Go right back to sleep, Harry.”

Harry nods, but he doesn’t turn back around into the bedroom. Instead he does a funny little shoulder squaring motion, his face inquisitive and determined. He’s in a thin expensive t-shirt that’s loose around the neck, but intentionally so, and his hair looks shower-washed and half-dry, a frizz of curls over his ears.

“Can I help?” Harry asks, a stranger in thin nightclothes, an earnest city boy looking at Louis with a worried pinch in his brows. “Do you just go out alone then?”

Louis’ heart does a funny pitter-pat, for whatever reason.

“It’s fine. I just get up to check, make sure nobody’s laboring. Sometimes they like to have baby sheep in the middle of the night. Go to sleep,” he whispers back, insistently. Harry is still gripping the doorframe of the bedroom, halfway in and halfway out. His pajama pants are a mossy-green. They’ve got a gold logo on them too, like Harry doesn’t own _anything_ that isn’t designer, even to sleep in. They look soft and luxury but wrong, somehow, thin and made for photographs, not springs as cold as this one.

“ _Baby sheep._ That’s cool, though. Wouldn’t want to miss it,” Harry says bravely, even though he looks like he could topple over in a strong wind. Even though Louis is pretty sure he needs eight or nine hours more of sleep, maybe ten, and probably the heartiest brunch Louis can cook up. If there’s one thing he’s got in the kitchen, it’s eggs.

“Don’t want to miss a _lambing check?”_ Louis says. “God, no, you know what I don’t want to miss? The chance to sleep. Take it when you can get it around here. Proptip.”

“Wait,” Harry says. He reaches back to the room and pulls out Louis’ coat. The thoughtfulness of it makes Louis freeze for a second before he can swing himself forward, top the steps and take it from him.

“Thanks,” Louis says.

“It's cold out there,” Harry says with the gentlest reproof. 

“I don't even notice,” Louis says.

“Well now you won't have to not notice,” Harry shoots back. And then seems to catch himself, folding back into something less teasing.

Louis wishes he hadn't. _Who spooked you, city boy?_

“You're right,” Louis says firmly.

Harry licks his bottom lip, distractingly slow, just the slightest reflection visible in Louis’ flashlight. Louis shifts, holding the coat like a dumbass. It’s been a while, his brain reminds him gleefully, since there’s been a _boy around here._  

 _And it'll be another while,_ he thinks loudly. 

“How about I get you if anything exciting happens?” Louis asks.

“Deal,” Harry whispers back. “First time on a farm. Can't miss the good stuff.” 

Louis feels his face make an uninterpretable expression. “There's an extra flannel at the bottom of the bed,” he says, back away down the stairs and eyeing Harry's designer pants with prejudice.

“Ok,” Harry says, with a small smile. A brave boy lost in the middle of a stranger’s farm, and yet...someone who wants to see the good stuff. 

Louis stares up at the stars all the way from the barn, kicking through frost. They’re bright, unopinionated, unhelpful. Nothing’s happened out in the barn, the sheep a solid mass of boring chewing and snoozing. Louis blinks and he’s back in his bedroom, his mind still full of thoughts of strangers in strange clothes.

 

***

 

Louis wakes up feeling relatively rested, although he’s definitely going to take a nap in the height of the afternoon. Luxury of not running a _real_ farm, after all. Sleep is interrupted so often during lambing season that he’s almost gotten used to it. But there’s a frittering buzz in his stomach; come summer and its hot, lazy days, there will be a lot more napping happening in the hammock which is currently stored under the stairs with the camping gear.

 _Harry._ Louis stares at the ceiling and allows himself more luxury: thinking of that face, those very nice hands, the undiluted pleasure of having another person in the house, the pull Louis had felt at the bottom of his ribcage whenever he made eye contact with the boy. Like a mystery, waiting to be solved. He hates it and loves it at the same time. Down the hall, the old grandfather clock chimes six.

Well, that’s that. He’ll find Jacob and the Harry-mystery will be over. Just a startlingly memorable stranger for Louis to nonetheless forget about, as the loneliness of the farm washes over everything. 

Louis rolls onto his stomach in the giant, king-sized bed in the master bedroom, another luxury he allows himself. The farmers aren’t always easy to contact; many of them don’t have good signal when they’re out, and the spring is an intense time. Louis is loathe to try the landline for anything other than emergency, and if he knows Jacob, the man’s already been out since five. So he texts the one person who serves as the informal, indispensable hub for them all--he texts Liam.

Lou-lou: _So before you say anything, I want you to promise not to say anything_

 

LiMark: _What did you do this time_

 

Liam texts back within ten seconds. Louis grins at the screen. He can imagine Liam in one of his comic book tshirts and a hoodie, leaning over the morning inventory with a pencil behind his ear.

 

Lou-lou: _Nothing how dare u_

 

LiMark: _Last time ‘nothing’ was an entire abandoned pipe organ, lou, and it took three hours and both our trucks to move it_

 

Oh yeah. That pipe organ is still in Louis’ barn on the second floor, covered in a tarp so it won't get shat on by the owls. Louis had found it in the midfield farmhouse that neither he nor Jacob used, between their two properties. It had probably belonged to a school that used to be part of the countryside here, or maybe it was a random, strange piece of crap left by Louis’ random, strange piece of crap family. There are weird things in the fields.

 

Lou-lou: _I don’t need your truck or your fabulous arm muscles this time. Promise. I’ve just gotta find Jacob, got something of his_

 

LiMark: _He’s your neighbor_

 

Louis sighs.

 

Lou-lou: _Yeah but it’s laaaaaambing, I can’t be away for more than two hours and I gotta come to yours to pick up supplies anyway, can’t drive all the way to Jacob’s and back if he’s not even home_

 

LiMark: _Leave it on the porch_ . _Jacob is in the upper fields._

 

Well, shit. Jacob definitely wouldn’t have service in the upper fields, besides the fact that even if Louis could reach him, he wouldn’t be able to leave the herd and come back down whenever he felt like it. Upper fields was a massive endeavor, moving the herd for the season change; it meant that Jacob had organized temp labor and pasture scheduling.

 

Lou-lou: _Uuuuum. It’s kind of not a thing I can leave on the porch._

 

LiMark: _Lou. What kind of animal is it? Did you finally go back to the fair and get that alpaca?_

 

Louis snorts. Liam knows him too well.

 

 _Remember when I said you can’t say anything? It’s a boy._ Louis looks contemplatively at the chevron pattern on his comforter before deciding to add: _i think he’s a little in trouble. Like on the run from smthng_

 

LiMark: _What the fuck lewis you can’t just steal boys_

 

Lou-lou: _Shut up. He was in my barn last night asleep_

 

LiMark: _WHA  A T_

 

Lou-lou: _Jacob’s really in the fields?_

 

LiMark: _He left yesterday, you know the drill. What is this guy, a farmhand? What do you mean he was in your barN?_

 

Louis snorts again. _Oh no. definitely not a farmhand. I...he was lost. He’s sleeping here for the mo’._

 

LiMark: _W H A AAAAT_

 

It’s accompanied by a long train of ghost-shocked emojis. Louis sticks out his tongue at the screen.

 

Lou-lou: _He's young. Clueless. I had to_

 

LiMark: _IS HE CUTE ???_

 

Louis groans, out loud. Louis has a delicately balanced system here on this farm, to keep him from thinking about things that he can’t have, and the most important part of it is not paying attention to foolish considerations like the cuteness of strange boys who don’t even live here.

 

LiMark: _I take your non answer as a yes. a lost city boy. i can’t believe you didn’t make him sleep in the field._

 

 _Shut up, you know I hate boys,_ Louis says, with a gif of a cat burrowing into a sofa. He can imagine Liam’s face, gleeful at Louis’ discomfort. _And people_

 

LiMark: _Suuuuuuure. well you gotta keep him now, i don’t make the rules_

 

Louis buries his face into the comforter to sigh. His phone chimes again--it’s a gif of a mime holding out a sign that says _don’t talk to me_ and Liam’s followed it up with a text that reads “ _= you.”_ He’s used this one so often that Louis suspects he has it saved on his phone for the purpose.

 

 _what am i supposed to do with a stray city boy,_ Louis writes, finally.

 

LiMark: _Bring him to the market!!!_

 

Three exclamation points. And Liam hasn’t even _seen_ Harry, the modellike shape of his face, the quaint strangeness of his manners, the far away, sad look in his eyes.

 

LiMark _: Oh and Lou? keep a lid on ur BAD JOKES_

 

Louis smashes his face into the comforter again. Liam is gonna have a really good time with this.

 

***

 

Louis is hovering over an industrial-sized pan of eggs when Harry wobbles into the kitchen on long legs and bare feet.

“Hi, thank you again, so much, for last night,” Harry says, standing in the doorway like a calf trying to decide whether to come out of the barn and into the sunlight for the first time.

“Are you afraid of chickens?” Louis asks, pointing a spatula at Harry, who blinks four times very quickly, but the question knocks the apologetic look off his face, and that’s mostly what Louis is going for.

“What?”

“Chickens,” Louis says. It’s possible that he’s had too many cups of coffee already, and ran out to the coop and back without boots, which was dumb, and got his heart racing. It’s also possible that he’s more sleep-deprived than he thought. He clears his throat. “They’re the ones with the murderous little beaks and the iridescent feathers. Eyes that make you feel like you’re being boiled alive. Are you afraid of chickens?”

“I don’t know, no?” Harry says carefully. “Is this a trick question?”  

“ _Great,”_ Louis says. “We’re taking the chickens down to Liam’s, see if we can get ahold of Jacob. May it be on your own head if you get chickenshit in your lap. There’s not a ton of room in a truck cab.”

Harry moves into the kitchen, smiling a little bit. Louis is only looking at him in small, measured, sideways glances, because the strange city boy is still pretty, concerningly pretty in the bright morning light. He looks much more hale than the night before, a rosy flush in his cheeks, even if he’s still just over the side of too-lean, and hesitant.  

“Why are we taking chickens to Liam?” Harry asks.

“They’re _chickens,”_ Louis says, waving the spatula. “Where to even begin. They wake up at four in the morning except when you expect them to, and then they all cackle into life at noon and startle you when you're napping. They try to die at every provocation. They attack each other and sometimes bits of twine. The dogs aren’t chicken trained.”  

“What did poor Liam do to deserve this?” Harry asks. That small, growing smile will be the slow death of Louis. He can already feel it, a vivid compulsion to find anything to make it stay.

“Spring trades,” Louis says, “We bring chickens for the season change. I have too many, and Liam’s gram needs a few hens, so I’m donating. You’ll find that the economy here is all about exchange.”

“Bed and Breakfast and Barter,” Harry says promptly.

“Bingo!” Louis laughs. He’s trying to figure out how to give Harry the bad news about Jacob, but bad news comes after food. Louis stirs the eggs--they’re good, if he says so himself. He’s made a scramble hash with fresh sausage and just the right amount of chopped tomatoes and onion, with some leftover baked sweet potatoes that have crystalized brown sugar edges, and an elaborate blend of cheeses that Liam swears by.

“That smells _incredible,”_ Harry says.

“What, you don't eat thirty eggs every morning in the city?” Louis says. A tiny sprinkling of herbs from the garden, that's what he was missing. They're stored in a tiny black ceramic cat that he got for Halloween but left out all year.

Harry laughs. Surprised, Louis looks at him.

“Sorry,” Harry says. It seems a bigger laugh than warranted by breakfast. “Sorry, sorry. I'm still loopy. How did I even end up here?”

“Bad taxi driving,” Louis mutters. He dishes a generous portion onto one of the good plates and hustles Harry into sitting at the solid, white wooden kitchen table. Harry goes lightly and easily, a little dazed and groggy from his travel still, maybe. Louis pushes him down into the chair without really thinking about it, his hand on Harry’s shoulder. He pulls it away a little too quickly to be smooth. 

He's gorgeous. Louis has got to stop thinking about it. Louis grabs a spare throw blanket from the window seat, the one with a red chevron pattern, another gift from Liam, when he’d first moved into the farmhouse.

“Throw it over your lap, stay warm, god, those pants look awful,” he says.

“Funny, people usually love my clothes,” Harry says. And there was that flash of teasing boldness that Louis had heard last night.

“ _People_ don’t have to spend ten hours in a stone dairy barn with drafts, do they. Need more people like that in your life,” Louis says.

“Maybe I do,” Harry says. He wrinkles his nose. That’s a new smile. It almost looks...fond. 

Louis looks away quickly. He can feel his own face pinch into a self-protective glare. It’s absurd, is what it is, he’s not used to filtering his thoughts around cute boys with mysterious pasts that don’t seem to have taken good care of them. But no one ever asked _you,_ Louis thinks to himself, just a little viciously.  

“Kitchen gets cold, the whole place gets cold, too expensive to heat up all the spaces in this house. I’m sure it’s not what you’re used to, but we don’t have a lot of luxuries out here.”

Harry looks away quickly, and back down at his plate. But his eyes still look mild and happy as he pulls the blanket over his knees.

“It’s an amazing farmhouse, I’ve never been in a farmhouse,” Harry says softly.

“Fun fact, it’s a hundred years old,” Louis says. A hundred years old and fixed with far too much money, but it’s home. “That’s what we say when the roof falls in after a long winter and people want to sue us.” 

“Bed and Breakfast and Barter and Bedlam,” Harry says. Louis looks at him.

“That was _terrible,”_ he says, icily.

“Oh, I know,” Harry says, with another dimpling smile. How is it possible that every time it’s a shock to Louis’ system, like a burst of maple syrup over his tongue, like stepping from a cool spring shadow into a hot beam of summer sun? 

“I just have, I dunno, a cereal bar for breakfast, in the city,” Harry muses with his mouth full of hash. He’s unwinding, under the blanket with his bare feet tucked onto the chair, still staring at the plate of food like it’s a museum piece. “If I eat breakfast at all.”

“That’s a crime,” Louis says flatly. “Did you miss the _breakfast_ part of the whole bed and breakfast?”

“Bed and Breakfast and Bullying,” Harry whispers, but with a proper grin now.

Louis scoffs over the counter. If Harry doesn’t have somebody making him an excellent breakfast every single morning, Louis feels that there’s something very wrong with the world.   

“Well on the farm, we eat breakfast,” Louis says, laying down the law. He pulls out two mugs to fill them with coffee, because Louis’ excellent pourover coffee is a truth serum, if he does say so himself. Louis plops himself down into the chair on the other side of the table, pushes a mug over to Harry, and then pushes over the creamer, which is a ceramic creamer in a particularly ugly shade of yellow, shaped like a rooster. 

“Is this actual cream?” Harry says, looking down at it like it’s fascinating. 

“Um, yes? What else would it be?”

“Any number of things,” Harry says, “Skim milk? What do people usually put in coffee?”

Louis gives him a long, steady stare over his own coffee mug, holding unblinking eye contact while he takes a sip. “This is truly dire. First whatever the fuck a breakfast bar is, but now this?”

Harry laughs, ducks his face in a delighted fashion, and pours a splash of cream into his coffee. Louis watches him consider the creamer, pour a second dash, and then add brown sugar from the sugar bowl like he’s getting away with a heist.  

“So. Is that why you came out here? In search of an actual, real-human-breakfast?”

Harry, his mouth full of eggs, looks considering. And then he gives a little shrug, like _what the hell._ Louis watches him across the table.

“Needed to escape,” Harry says. Straightforward and a little bit devastating. “Life was….well. I guess it’s all of it, really, that was crap. I needed to clear my head and, I just sort of bolted out of my entire life. Country seemed as good a place as any.”

He looks up. His eyes are green--Louis hadn’t caught that, in the blue light of the night before. His eyes are a shifting green, startling, ringed with dark lashes and under dark brows. He’d be beautiful in a photograph.

“I can understand that,” Louis says quietly. It was the mantra he’d heard in his own head, after all, one of the things that had kept him on this path for the past couple of years, despite some aching nights of thinking, _I’m the only one here._ But he hadn’t been, not with the whole farm around him, animals to feed and things to manage.

“This is crazy,” Harry says. Clearly, slowly. “I’m crazy. Crashing on the nice strange neighbor of my cousin. Imposing on you like this, I don’t--I’m not normally like this, I swear. I don’t even have my _phone.”_

Louis gets up to bring the coffee pot over. He doesn’t usually have to make enough for two people, but it’s a nice change to need more.

He doesn’t know what Harry’s running from, but he knows some things. The calm of making coffee, measuring out new grounds into the filter and eyeing them. The way it’s easier to feel safe when there’s something to do with your hands. Harry watches him, his big hand curled around the mug. Louis puts it on the scale and measures the grams, because he’s _particular_ about the pourover coffee, a trait he got from his grandmother. He tries to imbue the next bit with the steel-spine certainty that she’d always had, a farm girl made good in an overwhelming world. For all their differences, Louis had loved that about her.

“Look. I know we’re just...strangers. You’ve got no reason to listen to me, but. On the farm, thing is--on _this_ farm, there’s space for figuring things out. Even if you don’t know what that means, yet.” 

Harry flushes. It’s lovely, a pink rising across the high curve of his cheekbones, all the way back to his ears. He blinks over the mug of decadent, real-cream-filled coffee.

“Yeah?” He asks. It feels important. Louis nods at him. 

“Yeah. Now do you want to come help me feed about a million different animals?” Louis says. “Because they are all getting increasingly angry with me being late this morning.”

“What kind of a question is that, another trick question, you’ll have to teach me everything,” Harry says. 

“First thing is gonna be clothes that you don’t mind getting spit on,” Louis says, and at that, Harry cracks right up into his coffee.

Right on cue with the rising good mood, with a sixth sense for bacon, Simon and Garfunkel come barreling in through the doggie door in the mudroom.

Garfunkel runs head on into the broom, making it slam down on the tile floor, and spilling into his water dish. Simon catches sight of Harry and stops so fast he skids on the floor, into Garfunkel, who sprawls out on his short, absurd legs and starts howling.

Harry’s entire face contorts into something between surprise, laughter, and dismay.

“Oh, _gowan,_ ” Louis sighs as he pours them both a second helping from the pot of coffee, because what can you do. “It’s just a guest! Git, Garfunkel! Get out of the way.”

Garfunkel whirls in a frenzy of doggie exuberance, around Louis’ feet, trying to trip him as he goes to boil water, and then under the kitchen table and back out. It’s a ridiculous disruption to the serious mood, but Louis is grateful for it anyway.   

“Hi,” Harry says, putting a little hand out.

Simon is a-tremble, glancing from Harry to Garfunkel.

Garfunkel, disregarding all possible threat to life and limb if there’s bacon involved, bounces merrily up to the side of the kitchen table and gives a friendly smirk at Harry. Well, corgis are always smirking.

“Hi,” Harry repeats again in the ton of wonder that Garfunkel always manages to get from people. Louis rolls his eyes, but he’s ignored by all parties. “Aren’t you the cutest?”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Louis says to Simon, getting up with a long-suffering sigh, to clean the water and try and right the broom and dish and rescue the bacon from sniffing invaders. Can’t have a moment’s peace in this place, can he.

“I do mean it, but I mean it to that one as well,” Harry says resolutely. “They’re both equally the cutest.” 

Simon inches forward. Louis watches him out of the corner of his eye, trying not to make a big deal of it. Simon hardly lets a human being near him, save for Louis. Simon hides in the upstairs bedroom for the entire evening when Liam comes over. But here he is, drawing closer to Harry as Harry keeps petting Garfunkel, keeping up a low, calming stream of nonsense. 

“I see that you had an excellent run this morning while I slept,” Harry says. Garfunkel has wet paws, and they’re already getting the kitchen floor dirty.

“Don’t ruin the nice man’s fancy pajamas,” Louis mutters.

“No, do. I kind of hate these pajamas. I am very grateful that you let me stay here last night,” Harry tells the dogs, solemnly. Simon is within five feet of Harry and still getting closer, which is a genuine miracle.

“You’re beautiful,” Harry says. “A very proper dog. Do you need something? Your stare is a little intense.”

“He wants bacon,” Louis says. Simon perks his more mobile ear up at the word. “And he’s not getting it,” Louis hastens to add.

Harry and Simon’s faces look identically crestfallen. Louis has to turn away into the sink and start doing the dishes, to not show the smile spreading over his face. He’s a soft moron, he is.

 

***

 

They pack the chickens up in a travel case. Louis has already been out to the barn and back before Harry woke up for some quality sheep staring, but Joan Jett’s still holding steady, so it feels ok to go out to Liam’s.

Harry trails him, genuine about wanting to help feed the animals, which surprises Louis, and he’s not quite sure what to do with the feeling. He channels it into throwing two different sweatshirts onto Harry’s tall, skinny frame, and giving him a pair of jeans that are baggy enough to fit him but not nearly long enough. 

“God, that’s better,” Louis says before he can stop himself, looking at Harry critically in the mudroom. “It was giving me hives, those clothes.”

Harry _giggles._ It makes his eyes crinkle. It’s like he’s never wandered about on a saturday looking like a scarecrow. Not that he does, of course--of course he looks angelic, a curly head poking out of a loose sweatshirt, broad shoulders and a narrow waist only looking better surrounded by Louis’ absurd old farming clothes.

“What a treat,” Harry says happily, smoothing over the jeans. Louis has no idea what he’s talking about, so he just shakes his head, leads them outside. 

Louis is three yards toward the barn and yammering about feed, by the time he realizes that Harry’s stopped dead on the porch, staring at the spreading lawn.

“Oh, yeah, it’s awfully pretty in the morning,” Louis says.

It’s an understatement. The farm seems endless from the vantage point of the porch. The farmhouse is cleverly built on the centerpoint of a couple of the subtle, rolling hills that lead out to the fields--in the fresh light of the morning, it looks like a fairytale, paths dancing out, lined with green and soon-to-be-flowers. There’s an ancient row of trees along one path, the hints of a duck pond at the end of another. There’s a small footpath down to a creek where Louis has spent a lot of summer hours, sprawled out with a book and Garfunkel laying on the edge of the wooden bridge that he built here, the first year he was here. 

“Awfully pretty,” Harry echoes. But he’s looking at Louis, Louis realizes. Louis, in his lambing season jeans with ratty holes in the left thigh, his mismatched t-shirt with bleach stains all down the front. He feels so suddenly warm up the back of his neck that he has to wheel around, and plunge through the dewy grass, just to shake away the electric shock of Harry’s gaze.

 

***

 

Liam’s Market is the centerpiece of a town that’s so small, it rightfully shouldn’t have a centerpiece at all. _Town_ is really a shifting collection of whoever needs supplies from Liam, or more likely, just a little bit of company. Granted, there’s also a small school, and a fire department, and post office that will hold packages, when people are away in the upper fields. Or as Louis has often found, leave them out on the porch of Liam’s Market. Liam’s holds it all together though, like the pin pole in the middle of a circus tent.

“Does he sell any magazines, do you think?” Harry asks on the way in, clutching the wire cage of chickens like a champion.  

Louis glances at him. Harry’s tucked his hair into a distracting little bun at the top of his neck, with an elastic left by one of Louis’ sisters. He’s learned in the last hour that Harry likes to talk to animals, even chickens. That he’s two years younger than Louis and has an older sister, that he’s well read and clearly smart. That he’ll accidentally dump two days’ feed into the sheep trough if Louis doesn’t hold the closure of the bag tightly enough--or maybe not an accident, because Harry grins brazenly over the top and says _well they’re all hungry, just thought everyone should have a good breakfast,_ and it’s so charming that Louis almost has to sit down on the stone floor of the barn and despair.  

And he’s learned that he is a complete and total moron who’s getting a hopeless, fantasy-driven, weirdo crush on a lost city boy he barely knows.

The bun does not _help._

“Does Liam sell magazines, uh, I don’t think so, unless the tractor parts catalogue counts as a magazine,” Louis says.

“Well, that’s all right then,” Harry says. He's a puzzle. 

Liam is reading behind the counter when they wander in, and the swiftness of his head snapping up would be hilarious if Louis weren’t distracted by the itching presence of Harry behind him. 

“Harry BRIN,” Liam shouts. Louis covers his face with both his hands. What an embarrassment. Liam beams.

“Hello there, Jacob’s cousin and Louis’ guest!” 

“Hey,” Harry says, over the chickens, who are scrabbling about with the excitement of new voices and just general, terrible chickenness. “I’m uh, not Brin actually, but, yeah.”

“This is Liam, Liam, Harry. Please just ignore Liam, Harry,” Louis says.

“Shut up, twat. I know who Harry is,” Liam says. 

Harry _flinches._ He wobbles, and the chickens wobble dangerously, and get even more upset. He looks wary, the flinch an upset ripple across his face, like a secret laid bare.

Louis snaps into motion, easy, quick action born of needing to respond to the skitter of instincts around fields. He gently pulls the wire carrier from Harry’s hands and deposits it in the generally-recognized animal spot of the store, which is toward the front and by the door, far enough from the food and close enough to where trucks pull up for big deliveries off the porch. He swings back, touches Harry’s elbow with a careful set of fingers, calming and slow. 

“All right now,” Louis says soothingly. To the chickens, to Harry, possibly to Liam. 

“Sorry,” Harry says, with enough of a gasp in the end to show that he’s still a bit shaken but trying to pretend he’s not, a flutter in his eyes as he looks down and then back up, helpless to explain the overreaction. “Sorry.” 

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Liam says, quickly apologetic. But he’s quiet and calm too, watching them both, his kind brown eyes full of the same experience that Louis has. Liam leans forward on the counter, a nonthreatening gesture, puts his elbows down on it. He’s wearing an Ironman shirt and his thick, weekend glasses, and he’s been doing a crossword. He puts his hands on the counter, palms down. He smiles.

“I just meant Louis texted me. Not a lot of people our age in town. It’s good to meet you, Harry.” 

“Oh, right, of course,” Harry says. It doesn’t explain anything, but Liam and Louis just nod, and glance at each other, and let him get away with it. In a town this small, that's the only way. 

  
  
***  
  


Louis sits on the counter and edits Liam’s crossword. Harry’s borrowing his cell phone to call Jacob, balancing the phone book on his knees on the porch of the market. Although Louis suspects that he’s already got through to Jacob and now he’s calling somebody else, or trying to work up to calling somebody else, because he’s been chewing his lower lip and staring at the street for the last five minutes. 

“Lou, what’s the plan, I want to help,” Liam says, coming up with a market basket. 

“What are you on about,” Louis says.

Liam gestures, with the pencil he stows behind his ear, at Harry through the window. 

“The plan. This guy! Tell me what the plan is, I want to help.” 

“For fuck’s sake, there’s no plan with Harry. I’m just trying to get him back to Jacob’s. To the city, to, whatever," Louis grumbles. He's doodling a tiny lamb with devil horns in the margins of the crossword puzzle. Harry's making his phone call, it looks like. He looks unhappy, red in the cheeks. He's got to be talking to somebody from the city. Probably about his mysterious disappearance, from whatever the life is that bestows him designer clothes and that cloud over his brow. 

“Come on,” Liam says. “He's wearing your clothes. You know as well as I do that if Jacob is gone up to the high pastures, he’ll be gone at least a week. And if Harry wants to go back to the city, then chop me up and sell me for sunday dinner!” 

“Gross,” Louis splutters. "He's just...lost. He's hiding something. I don't want any part of that." 

“Come on, who cares? Like we're not all hiding something. Point is he’s gorgeous, and he carried your chickens, and he looks at you like you're something worth looking at. As your best friend in this town, I am obliged to tell you that these are important things worth pursuing further,” Liam says.

"I don't know what you expect me to do with that information," Louis hisses, stalking out from behind the counter to wander down the baking aisle, looking for flour and sugar. He’s got a sudden urge to bake something. Stress baking is a well known symptom of lambing season, and for Louis, a well known symptom of having to deal with strangers. Liam follows him, because Liam’s got no graciousness.

“Well good, you’ll need to do your shopping if Harry’s staying with you,” Liam says, brightly. 

"Excuse me?" Louis says, grabbing a tin of cocoa mix and a bag of marshmallows.  _Two_ bags of marshmallows.  “Liam, what the fuck--” Louis is starting when Liam interrupts him firmly.

“You found a delightfully good looking boy in your _barn,_ ” Liam says. He pulls one of the bags of marshmallows out of the basket and replaces it with a hefty thing of steak from the little butcher's bin on the end of the aisle. He grabs asparagus, a fresh loaf of bread, and  _candles._  
  
"Are you shopping for me?" Louis says. "Are you forcing me to buy a romantic dinner?"   
  
“And he needs a place to stay, and you’ve had neither hair nor hide of human contact for what? Months? Offer to let him stay with you, you've got the room in that god-forsaken farmhouse. It's perfect, Lou. Make him dinner. Take him stargazing. City boys, they love that shit.” 

“He’s not a pet,” Louis splutters, outraged. “And neither am I.” 

“I know that, idiot,” Liam says. “I’m not suggesting anything nefarious I’m just saying, you need to take advantage of this opportunity, because they don’t come around these parts very often.” 

“What, boys? Fuck you, Liam,” Louis says. “You’re not my nan, I don’t need this, any of this.”

Liam comes around the basket to take Louis' shoulder and look deep, deep into his eyes. Louis tries to wriggle out of it, but Liam has a farm-strong grip and he's indomitable when he thinks he's in the right. Louis sighs, as loudly as he can, and stares back. 

“Not  _ boys,”  _ Liam says. “People who make you smile.” 

Well. Louis opens his mouth, and then closes it. 

Liam squeezes Louis’ upper arm, unruffled by his rage. Liam’s impossible to stay mad at, he’s just got those eyes. Plus if Louis got mad at Liam then he wouldn’t have a place to go get haircuts and complain about football, and half his book club would be gone.

"I hate you," Louis says.  

"Oh, not nearly enough yet," Liam says, walking down the aisle with that determined, unstoppable gleam in his eye, heading for the produce section and its bouquets of fresh flowers. Louis groans, and follows in his wake.  
  



	3. Chapter 3

Liam’s words are ringing in Louis’ head when Harry comes back inside. He doesn’t intend to let the idea linger--it's born of Liam's infinite hopefulness that Louis will join him one day in the land of always having somebody to split morning inventory and fence repair checks with, and Liam's related dogged belief that that _happens_ for people like Louis--not everyone gets a Zayn, Louis should remind him, not everyone gets to stumble into the miracle of a handsome gay novelist who stopped in your rural Market to buy instant coffee and ended up staying for the rest of time.  

Harry’s _not_ _going to stay,_ miracles aren't real, it’s just an accident that he’s stumbled temporarily into Louis’ life with an intolerable jaw and shampoo-commercial hair and an impossible shoulder-to-waist-ratio, and a rueful, self-deprecating tone as he comes back into the market and says,

“Yeah, so like you said, Jacob won’t even be back to the farm until next week. And I’m--I’m a proper idiot.”

It crawls into Louis’ head, that voice, smashing into Liam’s absurd vision of stars and flowers and one-night-stand romances that somehow manage to be cute and not sleazy. Like it’s a reasonable idea to take a sort-of-accidental-guest on a surprise date on your own farm and hope for...something, even a temporary something. To lean into the warmth that sparked under Harry’s little teasing replies to Louis’ stupid jabs.

“No you’re not,” Louis yells from the baking aisle. Stupid, stupid. Liam pokes him in the side and Louis makes a bug-eyed face in his direction that would’ve shut his little sisters up but only makes Liam chortle. 

“I don’t even have a car,” Harry says. “I mean I _have_ a car, back home, but like, I never drive it, you know? I just have drivers. I just had somebody drive me out here and drop me off, what was I thinking?”

“You’re not an idiot,” Louis says, can’t stop himself from repeating it, staring into a tin of cornmeal and hoping that makes him sound more casual and less desperate to reassure Harry, cover that doubt with a blanket. Ah, cornmeal, fascinating.

“You’re _screwed_ ,” Liam whispers to Louis. Louis locks eyes with him and slowly, deliberately, drops the cornmeal on the floor. 

"You're screwed and you're five," Liam says. 

Harry has ambled around the corner to find them. He takes in the boxes on the floor and shrugs, as if to say,  _what is one more mess in this mess of a world._

“I forgot my phone. I brought two pairs of dress shoes and no phone,” he says. “Work is proper mad at me. Furious.”

“Well maybe you're a genius for leaving your phone,” Louis says, “They can't GPS you. Can they even find you without a street name? Liam sells rainboots, you know,”

“Good to know,” Harry says. Eyes bright, mouth working into something between courage and humor. “Maybe that makes me smart, on accident.” 

“Exactly. Cattle farmers are completely unpredictable, never know when they’re gonna be off in the upper pastures,” Liam agrees, wrestling two bags of flour away from Louis and muttering something about compensatory baking addictions. Like he doesn’t plow through Louis’ top-secret chocolate ganache cake every month on Chocolate Sundays.

“I didn't know cows were such a bother,” Harry says.

“Much safer to land yourself a sheep farmer,” Louis says, before realizing that probably sounded _much_ more than what he meant, and whapping Liam on the side of the head with a bag of chocolate chips to distract from the hot mess of his existence.

“Is that so?” Harry drawls, leaning into the shelf of ancient pre-mixed dry cake batters that nobody ever bought, because who in their right mind would buy a pre-mix in this land of heirloom family recipes and from-scratch weekend breads. 

Harry should’ve looked absurd, his hair everywhere from the wind outside the Market, Louis’ sweatshirt sleeves shoved up to his elbows, an errant chicken feather caught in one of his curls. He didn’t. He looked delicious, something suddenly radiating off him, almost movie-star in its charisma.

Louis feels suddenly certain that his face isn’t doing him any favors. Harry smirks at him, like a vision of a screen, like something photoshopped into the baking aisle. It’s captivating but it’s also not, like there’s a cold draft blowing in from under the door. The smirk doesn't look real. Whoever Harry is, he has an _act._ Whoever Harry is, that act is good.

“Well, you’re city, but you’re not an idiot, only your clothes,” Louis says, threatening Harry with the bag of chocolate chips. The act breaks. Harry snorts into real laughter, eyes crinkling, and then--shockingly--grabs a cake mix box off the shelf and lightly throws it, down the aisle, with a pretty impressive arc. Louis bats it out of the way and it hits the floor with the solid sound of decades-old vanilla powder.

“OI,” Liam exclaims, “If you wreck my shit I might reconsider giving you lot a shit ton of free food, in honor of Harry’s surprise guest stay at Louis’ farm." 

“Oh,” Harry says, “I wasn’t assuming--”

The cake mix box is three feet from Liam. Louis lines up on it stealthily, because it’s better to focus on that then on Harry when he casually says, “It’s no bother at all, you can stay, you know? Gotta sleep somewhere.”

“No it’s actually his job to take care of you, Harry, Louis runs a _rescue farm,”_ Liam chirps, because it’s his sworn mission in life to completely ruin Louis’, gleefully grinning between the two and generally acting like he’s doing something very sneaky and not totally embarrassing.  

“Shut the fuck up. Liam watches all movies with subtitles,” Louis shouts. He jabs the cake mix with a solid foot and it explodes, white powder exploding in an excellent rainfall of desiccated dessert all over Liam’s pants.

“Agnetha would miss you anyway. You’re welcome to stay the week, Harry. Until Jacob gets back."

“ _Bastard,”_ Liam sighs, accepting defeat. “You two better get back to _Agnetha.”_

“I do miss her,” Harry says. Louis’ face does another _awful_ thing, and Liam cackles, shakes a cake-dusted leg in his direction.

Harry hands Louis back his phone, squares his shoulders and looks into the middle distance of the spice rack, like he’s about to head off to war. “But I did call work, even though they're furious. I'm an idiot but I'm not like, terrible _._ They’ll come and get me tomorrow."

"Are you sure you want that?" Louis asks. Not like it's his place to ask, but. Lost animals, and all. 

Harry nods. He looks the opposite of convincing. "I should face up to my responsibilities, like--like you guys do." 

"I mean," Liam starts, and Louis gives him a warning glare, and he shuts up.    
  
"If I could just stay the night--” and Harry looks back at Louis, a look reminiscent of the one on Simon’s face every single time he’s about to crawl onto the couch and put his cautious head in Louis’ lap. 

“Of course,” Louis says. Not looking at Liam. 

“Then I’ll get out of your hair, I promise,” Harry says.  

“Of course,” Louis repeats firmly, not looking at Liam. Dinners and stars and roses wilt in the back of his mind, sad as an old cake box that nobody wants.

 

***

 

Harry curls up in the passenger seat of Louis’ truck as Louis loads the back, because for a boy who's unreasonably tall, he sure finds every way he can shrink into cozy spaces.

There’s a strap that goes over the feed bags, and a strap that holds down the long pieces of lumber that Louis is slowly but steadily collecting to fix the big, solid fence that will eventually let him expand past the small sheep pasture with its electric fence. Fences are harder work than anyone tells you in the kids' picturebooks about farms. Sometimes, Louis reflects, his entire life is just cycling between tying things down and then untying them, loading and unloading. Farm work is a little back breaking, and bending over the sheep makes his lower back sore, and he could probably use a hot bath and a long soak, and oh god he’s an ancient, crotchety old farmer, isn’t he, no different from Jacob or anybody else, and Harry’s as far away from his world as a star in the sky over the pasture.

He pulls the ratchet strap right out of its buckle and hits himself in the face, god _dammit._

“You all right?” Harry calls back.

“Peachy,” Louis says, threading the ratchet strap back. He has of course forgotten to get Liam’s cuticle cream, and there’s a suspicious patch of irritated skin on his palm. Fuck, and he forgot that he needs a hair cut, has to shake a long piece of fringe out from his eye. It only makes the whole situation worse. Life is tying things down and then hauling them out and all the while you get hair in your eyes. Harry probably has a thousand dollar moisturizer. Louis doesn't understand the economics of toiletries anymore than he did back when he lived in that world, but he just bets on it. 

“Are you really sure it’s no trouble to let me crash the night again? Because Jacob did say there’s a key under the mat,” Harry asks when Louis finally gets back in the cab, eyes enormous over the thermos of hot chocolate that Liam had insisted on making for him, even though they're both still stuffed from breakfast. 

“Please, that’s now how things work around here. Jacob would have my head if I didn’t keep his little city cousin safe until tomorrow,” Louis says. _Little._ He even sounds like a grandpa. God.  

Harry’s got the bag of groceries between his feet. It contains the flowers, because Liam stuck them in at the last second with an earnest expression and a sly pat on Louis’ back, like that was somehow gonna just really do it, a bouquet of big sunflowers in the middle of Louis’ kitchen table. 

“He’s nice, your friend Liam,” Harry says. 

“He cheats at crosswords, and board games,” Louis says.

“How?” Harry asks.

Louis waves a hand. “He just does.”

“No, I want to know how,” Harry says. “How do you possibly cheat at crosswords and board games? Like at a one-on-one board game with you?”

“Sometimes there’s more people!” Louis protests. “Sometimes there’s like, a monthly board game night in the post office, and we get like maybe _six_ entire people. And you can absolutely cheat with one-on-one board games, for example, Liam makes cocktails and doesn’t tell me how much is in them and then I make bad decisions and he makes better decisions that get him more points in the game.”

“So what you’re saying is, that Liam cheats by strategically winning,” Harry says.

“Fuck off. He cheats at crosswords by not letting us ring up at the cash register until we answer the difficult ones for him,” Louis says. He’s got a massive grin on his face, and so does Harry. 

“Good at that, are you?” Harry asks.

“A bit,” Louis says.

“Thought so,” Harry says, with an air of great satisfaction. Like there’s something particularly revealing about Louis being good at crosswords, and Harry, spirit of the springtime come to rattle up the inside of Louis’ skull, is going to hold onto that power until he can use it.  

 "Bed and breakfast and board games," Harry mutters, looking out the window. It startles Louis, almost shakes a terribly vulnerable laugh out of him. The feeling of it makes him swallows hard, like this stupid ongoing joke is a palpable thing stuck in his throat, sweet and disturbing at once. 

One day, one night. Louis eyes the flowers poking out of the bag, eyes Harry where he sits on the edge of the truck seat watching trees go by.

“I’ve got a tv, and books, and a pretty good movie selection, so, you'll be ok,” Louis says.

Harry swivels back to look at him. “What do you mean?” 

Louis frowns at him. At the sunflowers, more, with their dumb optimism. Sunflowers are such a straightforward flower, like a little kids' drawing. Like his clumsy fence, his quilts on the wall. "I mean, just, for today, so you don't get bored today." 

Harry looks out the window, and then back at Louis, one eyebrow raised. “Can I come around the farm with you? Help out?”

“I mean, if you _want,”_ Louis says doubtfully. "It's no fairy tale." 

“Believe me, I’ve had enough of those,” Harry says. Just what a chaos-causing spring god who wanted to remain in disguise _would_ say.

 

***

 

Louis watches Harry hold four baby rabbits at the same time and practically dissolve into the poured-cement floor of the barn with his own happiness. They’ve had a good sandwich lunch thanks to Liam’s over-stuffed bag of groceries. They’d sat on the steps of the porch and Harry had told Louis, first quietly, and then enthusiastically, about things like his covert love for nature documentaries, how he never knew the country could be so green. BBC Earth in every hotel room, he’d said. Simon had rested his jaw on Harry’s borrowed jeans, gotten slobber all over the denim, and Harry hadn’t even seemed to notice. 

Not the normal place to watch documentaries, Louis didn’t point out. 

Now, Harry holds baby rabbits up to his chest, carefully cradled with the entire width of his hand outstretched to keep them from wriggling away, and watches Louis fix the back half of the hutch.

"They destroy this about, oh, once every six months," Louis says, and tries not to sound proud. The sheep are making some "are we getting fed extra today" noises, because hope springs eternal in the breast of an agriculture herd animal bred mostly to eat.  _Louis'_ hope is that Harry has got his hands too full of baby bunny to sneak off and feed them extra. Harry seems like the type, a soft touch in the face of shameless pleas.

“How do you keep your patience with them all?” Harry asks. 

Louis is put off by being wrapped in chicken wire, and gives the honest answer. “What? I don’t know that I do. I’m kind of a cranky grandpa, if you haven’t noticed. I take pride in that.” 

Harry hums disrespectfully into the top of a tiny baby rabbit head. It’s practically asleep, which is rare for a prey animal. Louis has locked Garfunkel outside the barn, critical during rabbit-handling times, and he’s scratching eagerly at the faded red door. “I’ve noticed, and you’re not.” 

Harry manages to hold all the rabbits and also bop Simon gently on the head with his elbow. Harry should be surrounded by furry things at all times, Louis is certain about it now. Louis has let Simon into the barn because unlike _Garfunkel_ , Simon is calm and quiet and uninterested in eating small rabbits or bothering the lambs. And he seems to love Harry, wants to sit quietly in Harry's shadow and just soak up his presence. Louis can understand that. 

Louis grunts, winding the wire in a new place, and trying to avoid giving himself new abrasions. He’s bent halfway into a hutch and he feels a little ridiculous, but Harry had claimed he wanted to go along with Louis today instead of hanging out in the farmhouse. And Louis isn’t such a good person that he can deny himself the company, the chance to look at Harry sideways when Harry isn’t noticing, even if nothing is ever going to come of this.

“Come on," Harry prompts. Louis shrugs, probably where Harry can't even see it, making a face at him through wire and wood.

“It’s not so much that I have to be patient all the time. I just have to care all the time. And that? That’s easy. Animals, living things, they’re just good, you know? For a long time before this I...I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I’d gotten a lot of things handed to me and it made it hard to see the value in anything. And then I discovered farming, which was like, my old family history. Moved out here, got people to show me how to do it. Oh, it’s not a _real_ farm, but still. There were always these little outliers, these animals that needed somebody to look after them.”

“You’re a rescue farm,” Harry says.

Louis looks at him. Harry lifts one shoulder, lowers it.

“I guessed, even before Liam says,” he says. “All the animals, they all seem like they’re getting a second chance. Doesn't seem like you actually run a big farm, or whatever, selling milk with automated udders.”

"Automated  _udders?"_ Louis exclaims. Harry turns the best shade of pink in the world, stuffs his nose into the top of a baby bunny's head and sniffs, with a fake frown. 

"I've watched farm documentaries," he protests. 

Louis is still cackling, and Harry groans. "I mean you're not wrong," he says when he can finally get the words out.  

“Yeah. It’s a rescue farm. I didn’t need to have a full, industrial farm, and I came out here and there was a flock that someone was going to get rid of and I just...one thing led to another. I like doing this because...it’s just good to take care of things.”

Harry nods, and deposits the rabbits carefully back into the hutch as Louis guides him. He seems to be thinking it over. 

As the chores get more physical there's less conversation, but it's....it's shockingly nice. Harry is eager to learn and eager to help, like everything on the farm is a fresh surprise. It's a clear day, still cold, but they pile on beanies from the tub Louis keeps by the door and take a long walk deep into the fields. Harry doesn't show any hesitation in helping carry giant planks of wood over to the fence repair spot, and he doesn't show any contempt at all when Louis falls over his words a little, trying to explain why it's such a mess where the fences meet. There's always some part that's a mess, and this is the current one. It's overgrown back here, and much of the wood had rotted out since no one had done regular maintenance once Louis' family had stopped caring about this place. The sheep are all right with an electric fence but it's a point of pride for Louis to fix it, he thinks, some symbol of  _what he can do now._

And he actually says that out loud, and then flushes, but Harry nods and smiles his sweet smile and it's so encouraging that Louis just babbles on, more than he intends to, honestly. About the difficulty of repairing fences when you're only one person, about how he's been meaning to re-irrigate the upper fields but hasn't yet, about the first year when the farmers from all around had shown up in the summer to help with shearing, without even calling. They'd just pounded on his porch and Louis had come running out with Garfunkel yapping to find the whole town there, Liam and Zayn arm-in-arm supplying a breakfast and Jacob setting up in Louis' barn. 

"That's your family," Louis says. Like Harry would forget it. But Harry still looks grateful for the comment. Distant family, Louis thinks, recognizing the general feeling of it. The kind of person who'd never expect you to visit. But Jacob was kind, and the farms were kind, when you make it all the way out here. 

"Yours too, sounds like," Harry says. 

 

***

The day slips away like it always does on the farm. It's time for a late dinner and time to be done with work, but they've gotten trapped by the cuteness of lambs back in the pasture and Louis is happy to let it happen. 

He's ostensibly checking around the borders of the electric fence where he repaired two fiberglass poles last week, but really watching Harry with the late sun outlining his profile, when his phone buzzes in his pocket. 

Louis frowns at the screen. It’s a city number, city area code, so surprising that for a second it makes him hold his breath. The echo of how he felt two years ago, first arrived on the farm, so green and so determined, so frightened someone was just around the corner from calling him out on the whole scheme. 

But he’s not that anymore. And underneath the number is the record, an outgoing call to this number from Louis’ phone this morning.

Oh, it’ll be for Harry, then.

“Harry?” a man’s voice, all-city in its accent. Louis has mostly lost that clip, himself.

“Hey, hi,” Louis says, answering quickly and walking toward Harry, in case the call drops out of the minimal service area that stretches roughly across this side of the pasture to the barn, a high elevation point unencumbered by trees. Harry’s half a pasture away and oblivious, dancing around with Agnetha in some kind of elaborate game of lamb-tag that has Agnetha and three of the other lambs following him around, bleating happily. Because Harry’s singular goal in life is to _kill_ Louis. “I’m not Harry but--” 

“Well then who the fuck are you?” A voice cuts in sharply. It’s an upperclass accent with all the snot that entails, tightly wound. Louis slows, startled. 

“You’re calling _my_ _phone_ ,” he says calmly. There’s a beat.

“Ok, fair enough. My name's Mark Galthis, and I’m looking for Harry, I'm his manager,” the man says. He says it slowly, like Louis should know who he is, and like Louis is an idiot. “He called from this number, and then he hung up, and I’ve been trying to get him back all day. Why doesn’t Harry have _his_ phone? Is he ok? And who are _you?_ ” 

“Not a lot of service here, but I’m a friend he’s staying with, neighbor of his family’s, I’m getting him for you,” Louis says. He walks through the grass, tries to wave Harry down, but Harry’s deep in focus on the lambs and isn’t looking. 

There’s a quick huff of air. The man sounds agitated, a spring wound too tight. Louis dislikes him with an immediate, animal instinct.

“Friend, huh?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Louis says, unsure what that means.

“Listen, _friend of Harry’s,_ I don’t know what the fuck you’re up to, but I’d like Harry to come back, all right? Is there something you need, to help me make that happen?”

Louis stops dead in the middle of the pasture, brow wrinkling in confusion. “What?” 

“Did you convince him to leave?” The man chuckled, dry and humorless in the back of his throat. “Is that what this is about? Run off with a guy on a bender vacation or something, I mean, _christ.”_

It's such a contrast to the pasture, the rising green grass around his boots. Louis stares at the grass, trying to even catch up to the implications. 

"It's not that," he says slowly.  

"I'll do whatever you want to make Harry come back, money? Contacts? Whoever the fuck you are, I can get you something. Just break up with him and send him back," the man says briskly. Like he's switched a gear, flipped a page to another side in a playbook that Louis is supposed to know. Louis has known men like this, has known  _industries_ like this, where people trade each other like cards, bat each other around like parcels. It's just a shock to feel like it's reaching out here to his farm. And Harry's the commodity, that's obvious; Harry's the one being traded by anyone with a need that outweighs their conscience. 

He walks toward Harry. Harry's looking up now, finally noticed, and he's frowning. 

"Listen,  _Mark,"_ Louis says, echoing the tone. Because he's angry now, and Louis doesn't get angry all that often but when he does it's fierce, burning through him. "From you, I don't want anything at all." 

He pulls the phone away from his ear before he can hear any response, and holds it out to Harry. Harry takes it without any sign of surprise. He just looks resigned, beaten down. Louis has to stuff his fists into his pockets, to keep from crossing more boundaries than he's already crossed. 

“Mark,” Harry breathes into the phone. Louis is a bit ashamed of the way that he watches Harry walk away, to stand near the fence. He shoves stray hairs behind his ear as he talks, or mostly listens, looking down at the path that leads to the creek.

It's a mystery, but not such a mystery anymore. Whatever the details are, Harry something important. Whatever he’s come out to the farms for, it’s something real. Whatever he’s left behind him in the city, that thing he had to leave so fast he came in those ridiculous clothes, well, that's real, too, and it wants him back.

Anni-Frid and Benny are following Agnetha in a merry chase, a dervish lamb circle of limbs. They're growing so fast. 

"All right?" Louis asks softly, when Harry comes back. He's still holding Louis' phone and looking down at the screen. "Bed and Breakfast and bastards, eh?" 

Harry tries to smile, but fails. He holds the phone out quickly, like he's about to lose his nerve. 

“Here,”

"You know, you don't have--" 

“So I’m an actor,” Harry says quickly. "Among, among other things." 

“Really?” Louis asks, astonished. But also not astonished because--yeah. Ok, yeah. He looks down at the phone.  

He can't totally make the connection at first, between the thumbnail images and disjointed text excerpts in the search results and the boy in front of him with his rigid shoulders, his long, earnest face. It's like a strange scrapbook, flipping through all the Google results that come up--Harry's only googled his name, his  _real name--_ or at least, whatever the world thinks his real name is, because _Styles_ doesn't feel like it could be real, maybe it's a stage name--and Harry's the kind of person to have a stage name, that much is clear, because Harry's not an ordinary person, he's  _famous_. _Harry Styles._ Louis looks at him and then back down at the screen and sees a stranger: a gorgeous man in a thousand photographs, catwalking or paparazzied, Harry with labels stamped all over his image, brands that Louis vaguely recognizes and then brands that anyone in the world would recognize. And there are so many other labels too, blurring together as Louis scrolls, but enough for him to get some kind of gestalt about  _Harry Styles, movie star._ or  _Harry Styles, child star_  with a mop-haired child picture,or  _Stunning box office open for rising bad boy Harry Styles_ _!_ on top of a poster for a movie that Louis vaguely remembers Liam wanting to see, but they'd never gotten around to it. Or  _Harry Styles caught sneaking out of gay club_ emblazoned over a photo of Harry getting into a totally ordinary cab and looking calm,  _no labels Harry Styles_ like that was a god-damn crime, and shit rag lines like  _Harry Styles secret drug shame?!_ or  _Harry Styles, playboy,_ or  _Harry Styles at home--secret scandals revealed!_

"Most of it's not real," Harry says. "Most of me. Most of  _me_ isn't real. But you see why, why they were so mad that I left. Mark's my manager, he has a right to be mad, you know? It's a whole operation, being me. Can't believe I just left. We're in the middle of an entire promotion cycle and a--this is, this is not the time to lose my shit and take a _break._ I don't know what I was thinking. And I'm sorry he called you." 

"Have you ever seen swallow nests?" Louis asks.

"What?" Harry says. He's twisting his hands together, and Louis wants to untangle them and take one of them, but he's got no right. Agnetha, unused to being ignored, buts up against Harry's calf and he smiles for a quick, flickering instant. 

"Come on," Louis says. 

He leads Harry to the second story of the barn. It's up the winding drive, because the barn is built into a hill so that you can drive a truck up to the second floor and load it, but it still feels high here, another vantage point on all the trees and fields.  _How did we ever leave this place,_ Louis had thought, when he'd first come here. He still wonders if he brought his grandmother back, she'd understand. Or maybe she doesn't miss it at all, in their very different life of prestige and empire. Maybe she'd passed all that missing on to Louis, because he'd felt at home as soon as he'd arrived here. 

The second floor is a big space used mostly for storage, a mirror-image of the floor below, and Louis has always found it peaceful and sheltering The barn is L-shaped, like many of the dairy barns in this area, a maze of divided large sections for the wrangling of the cows. But on the second floor all the divisions between parts are long gone, and it's just boxes and tarps and a high, high roof full of birds.

"They nest here, that's why they're called barn swallows," Louis says. "I'm pretty damn sure that we've also got some owls around, which I dunno, seems very risky for the swallows. But here they are." 

"Here they are," Harry says, head craned back and watching with awe, despite the flush of embarrassment and emotion still visible down his neck. Swallows move just like you hope they will, in looping, cursive acrobatics around each other. 

"You want to know something magical about this place?" Louis says. 

"What?" Harry's not looking at him. He's looking up at the place where the swallows roost, a wooden platform built on whimsy to look out from the high round window at the very top arch of the barn. They've built out mud and straw nests, made a cozy thing of crude materials. 

Louis comes up to his side. Slowly, because he imagines that not a lot of people have given  _Harry Styles_ the chance to pull away if he wants to, to have a bubble of space around his body, if he wants it. But Harry leans toward him, not away. Louis puts his arm out with an inquisitive expression, a soft, gentle look that says _it's all right, you know? Any version of you, or not at all._

Harry leans further in. Louis puts an arm around Harry, around his lean, tall torso, his beautiful frame. Just lightly, just enough to squeeze. 

"Really bad phone service," Louis says. With his free hand, he thumbs off the phone screen, and the winding-down chime echoes in the top floor. 

Harry breathes--Louis can feel it under his arm, a really deep breath, full down through the bottom of his lungs. 

And of course, of  _course,_ that's when Louis hears the _baa_ from downstairs, through the hay-drop hole in the second floor that goes directly over the feed trough, where his last ewe has been huddled in an open milking pen for a week. 

 

***

 

"I'm gonna need you to stay calm," Louis says. 

"I'm  _trying,"_ Harry says, his voice high and reedy. 

"Haha," Louis says, "I am actually talking to myself. Bad habits of the lone farmer." 

"Ah," Harry says weakly. Louis tries to smile at him, because he's doing a bang-up job of surviving a lambing anyway, holding a bucket of antiseptic steady while Louis tries to maneuver two misplaced lambs back into place inside of a sheep. 

"Bed and breakfast and babbling and bad habits," Harry tries. 

"You are only getting a pass," Louis grunts, "Because I'm at a significant disadvantage here." 

They're in the former milking pen with Joan Jett, crouched in the hay and muck. Louis can feel his heart pounding in his ears. It's been a couple of hours since she went in and the barn's getting colder, yellow lights making everything look stark. Louis is up to his elbow, manipulating the lambs into a position less tangled and trying, desperately, to act more confident than he feels. 

"You've got this, Joanie," Louis says, not caring if he sounds like an idiot. 

"You've  _got this,"_ Harry chants, waving the lantern side to side like a cheerleader.  

Joan Jett, who has no confidence that she's got this, bleats unhappily. Louis is about three minutes away from sending Harry back to the landline to call the vet out; lambs can only survive the pressure for so long. This is the truly brutal part of farm work, this fear and cold and tension as the sun gets lower. 

And then she thrashes. "God  _damn,"_ Louis curses, just an inch from getting the first lamb head in the right spot and suddenly shaken, falling backward onto his ass. "Harry, can you--is it--" 

"What, I can try," Harry says, brave as anything. Louis gives him a bracing nod. "Look, can you brace her down, gently, I've got just two limbs in the way but you have to keep her from moving." 

He can  _see_ the resolve flow over Harry's face, his mouth press together in a determined line and his shoulders square. 

"You can do it," Louis says. He doesn't know if it sounds convincing. It's Harry Styles, it's ludicrous, a movie star standing there in borrowed baggy jeans and self-doubt in the middle of his barn, but right now there's an animal in need and it doesn't matter, Louis would ask the god-damn-Pope for a hand. 

"Let's go," Harry says, and then he's  _in it,_ knees squelching into the muck of the barn floor, slipping a little bit but getting a long, strong arm around the heft of the ewe, following Louis' instructions. Sheep are hard to handle and sheep in pain are as hard to handle as anything, but Harry grits his teeth and pushes down with even pressure and Louis seizes the instant of peace. 

And  _there._ A lambing, it never gets old--two brand new tiny things and they look healthy, they look fine, they look disgruntled and sopping and sticky in the lamplight, _alive._  

“Hey, it’s all right,” Louis says, because it _is._ Joan Jett is already shuffling off the entire experience, lurching to her feet with the stoicism that only farm animal mums can display. The lambs are up, wobbly and sticky and pathetic, but they’re up and over to her and they’re nursing so. It’s all right.

Louis realizes he’s patting Harry absurdly on the arm, maybe inadvisable given the general state of his hands, but they’re gonna have to bucket-mash the clothes and throw them in the outside washer anyway, the one that Louis uses to prewash. Doesn’t matter, it just really doesn’t matter. They're both leaning back on their heels, and they're covered in bits of hay. “It’s all right,” Louis is repeating. 

“They're ok?” Harry asks, looking between Louis and the new lambs. It's a privilege, Louis realizes, holding Harry's fear and confidence, being the voice who gets to say whether it's ok. It's a shock, realizing that he _is_ that person, two years and a little more into this insane farming venture. That he really does know.

“So ok, we did good. They're fine,” Louis says. They're tiny and sturdier than seems credible, already cleaned up by Joan, nursing, settling in the hay and the brand new world. Louis lets out a breath. "What a good one, girl," he says to Joan, farming grandpa out in full force, and who the fuck cares. 

Harry just _beams._ He’s covered in stick and filth and there’s straw sticking out of his hair. He looks grimy and real and so, so happy.

“Oh my god, I’ve destroyed Harry Styles, famous actor,” Louis says. 

“This is the best goddamn day of my life,” Harry says.

  
***

 

Louis takes a shower and lets the heat from the water soak into his muscles, luxuriates in the excellent shower pressure he’d made such a priority even in this old farmhouse. They’d run back, still laughing and breathless, stars overhead and high on the euphoria of a good lambing. There’s an all-encompassing warmth in his stomach that means, _everybody’s safe._ Dogs fed downstairs, lambs curled up in the barn, a whole wide farm of beautiful things, quiet and settling.

They’d stripped down to boxers off on the side porch, Harry chattering on about the lambs, Louis just _laughing,_ because how was he supposed to do anything else? And then he’d frozen, frozen solid in his boots with his sheep-muck-covered shirt hanging off his arms, because Harry was looking at him _,_ eyes shining, raking up the stretch of Louis’ exposed stomach, the flex in his shoulders.

And Louis had just...bustled them out of the cold, snapping about showers and Harry’s clumsiness and bad aim, missing the washing machine by a mile when he threw his jeans at it. And Harry laughed, which was at once terrible and wonderful, and something that Louis was trying very hard to convince himself was  _enough._

Louis sighs. He hits his head against the shower tile. He’s an _ass._

He feels too awake, too alive. Too trapped in the wonder of Harry’s green eyes, so wide, so arresting. He should go to bed, it’s the middle of the night, but he _can’t._  

He doesn’t have a plan, so when he walks out into the hallway at the exact same time as Harry, they both freeze. 

“Hey,” Louis says softly.

“Hey,” Harry says back.

He’s smiling, not the biggest one, but the one that most knocks Louis breathless regardless, crooked on the left side, special. Louis doesn’t know at what point he started documenting all of the nuances of Harry’s smiles--early, he thinks, probably the first one, maybe even before, when the smiles were only ghosts--but it’s just such a good one. Harry’s pulling a towel up through the back of his wet hair, heedless of the way it makes his curls frizz behind the ears. He’s wearing the thick sweatpants that Louis laid out on his bed, five years old and completely logoless. He’s not wearing a shirt. Louis can’t stop his eyes from skittering over Harry’s model-beautiful body, with its mysterious tattoos, with its history he wants to read. 

“You did amazing out there,” Louis says. They’re standing in the dark, stars out the window. Louis sways toward Harry without even meaning to, and he pulls himself back.

Harry’s still watching him. Louis flushes all the way down his neck, under the intensity of that gaze.

“Yeah? You really think so?” Harry says, quiet and earnest.

It hurts, the fact that Louis can still hear an undercurrent of doubt when Harry talks about himself. He wants to bundle Harry into the farmhouse second bedroom to sleep away every moment of doubt; he wants a thousand midnight lambings to show him that the way he moves his hands means more than the way they look. He wants for them to spend a month, or months, walking into Liam’s market in whatever clothes were clean, in silly hats and stupid shirts. He wants to see Harry’s real laugh, that crinkles up his face and puts lines around his eyes and is more beautiful, so much more beautiful, than when he holds his face still and vacant.

“Proper farmer, you could do anything, if you wanted to,” Louis says, looking out the window. “You’re wonderful with the animals, don’t doubt that. I know maybe everything else in your life is confusing, but now you've got two lamb godchildren. So.”

It hurts, wanting what you can’t have. It hurts, when what you can’t have lands right in the middle of your lonely farm, and follows you around and doesn’t even seem to mind. It hurts, but it’s a hurt that Louis is grateful to have had. He’ll turn around, and go to bed, and they’ll wake up in the morning and send Harry back to his glamorous life, the kind of life that people like Harry _should_ get to have, packaged back up in his fancy clothes and surrounded by people who don’t smell like a barn for twelve hours of the day. 

“You really think so,” Harry says, not a question this time. He steps closer in the hallway, probably without meaning to.

“Bed and breakfast and babies, gotta be worth something, right?" Harry's looking at him, and Louis has been memorizing his face for twenty-four hours but that doesn't mean he can interpret the expression on it right now. He just hopes he isn't making anything worse. 

"And hey,” Louis says, bravely continuing on, because that’s what you _do,_ dammit, “Look at you, finally making sensible pajama choices--”

He doesn’t finish the sentence before Harry pushes into his space, wraps two big hands around Louis’ elbows, pulls them flush up against each other in the dark hallway, and finds Louis’ face with his own. Harry kisses him, gently, softly, sweetly, pressing their mouths together with enough hesitation that Louis could’ve pulled away if he’d wanted to, but with enough urgency that Louis knows Harry really, really doesn’t want him to.

And Louis _god damn_ does not want to, either. He wants to push right back, wants to gasp against Harry’s mouth, his wide, beautifully-shaped lips, he wants to push up and feel the scruff of Harry’s chin, find a fit between their mouths, warm and wanting and gentle. So he makes it happen. 

Harry makes a small noise, low in his throat, a shudder Louis can feel in his chest. It sounds like surprise and joy and _finally._ His waist is shower-warm, shirtless under Louis’ investigatory hands, which have found their way to Harry’s lower back and carefully pulled him closer. Harry’s tall, so it forces Louis up onto the balls of his feet, to keep kissing him. He kisses slowly, dizzingly slowly, tastes like molasses and sleeping-in mornings and the triumphant end of a lambing season. He tastes like spring, erupting into Louis’ mouth like an entire new universe.

“Harry,” Louis gasps into his mouth, and he doesn’t even care that it sounds breathy and astonished, that he’s holding onto Harry as much as pulling him in, because Harry’s smiling against Louis’ cheek and brushing his nose over Louis’ nose and it’s everything tender and wonderful.

“Can I,” Harry murmurs into Louis’ ear. They’ve wound up leaning into the wall of the hallway, and Harry is radiating heat, his long legs pressing up against Louis’ hipbones and thighs, more invasive for being so slow, and so tender. “Do you want to?”  

“I want absolutely anything, that you’d like to do, if you’d like to do it,” Louis says, blinking at him through the moonlight. “No pressure,” he adds belatedly.

Harry chuckles in the back of his throat, kissing instead of answering, but it’s not _at_ Louis it’s simply _with_ Louis, and Louis finds himself laughing back in a way that gets caught in the back of his throat, because it’s just--it’s just magical, the pull of the heat between them and the catching sparks at the fuse of Louis’ desire. Invisible for so long, like a seed under snow, and now suddenly _here._

Louis steps backward, and Harry follows, letting Louis pull him this time. He smiles at Louis all the way down the hall, all the way into Louis’ bedroom. He’s such a gorgeous contradiction, too much doubt and too much experience, joy and frankness and fatigue. Louis wants to protect him, to cast a spell on the borders of the farm that keep an uncaring world away from Harry forever.

“I like you,” Louis says simply, because that feels important. “I really like you. You, you, not fancy city you.” 

Harry’s proper grinning now, his eyes a little narrowed like he can see the workings of Louis’ embarrassing mind. Louis doesn’t even care.

“That’s the thing,” Harry says, as he follows Louis down onto the bed. It smells like clean laundry, like a fresh shower, Louis’ wet hair dripping on the pillow, but that’s ok. “I know that. I might be a complete mess, crashed on your farm like a meteor, but. I know that for sure.”

“To give you credit, you crashed into my sheep,” Louis says. 

“They're the ones with wool,” Harry says.

Louis gets himself situated on his side, bracing himself up on an elbow. Harry lets him, lets his own eyes flutter shut in obvious pleasure. _Luxuries,_ Louis thinks, the massive king-size bed around them and the warm sanctuary of his bedroom. _Let yourself have luxuries._

“Who even watches documentaries,” Louis says, kissing up Harry’s neck.

"Bed and breakfast and BBC," Harry says promptly, even though he's melting into the way that Louis is kissing his neck and there's a loose shiver Louis can feel in his hands, pushing up onto Louis' stomach and then smoothing over the skin. 

"Low blow," Louis mutters. He winds his fingers into Harry's and presses his hand knuckle-down into the sheets, just a simulacrum of holding him down, easy and careful and tender. "Low."  

“You’re incredibly bossy for somebody so small, and you frown at the things that you want,” Harry says. Louis tries to be _outraged_ but Harry has attacked him, suddenly getting his superior weight over Louis’ lower half, and now they’re out of the realm of slow kisses and into the thick, breathless feeling of their bodies wrapped together, even through warm sweatpants. Harry bites his neck, and Louis _whimpers,_ loses a little bit of his self-possession.

“Oh, I like _that,_ I wondered what would put you off your game, _”_ Harry says. Louis’ eyes have rolled a little bit back in their sockets, with the feeling of Harry’s hands so much bolder now. He’s rolling his hips up, a sweet friction still slower than either of them wants, but what a good way to suffer.

“Shut up, should leave you to sleep in the barn,” Louis says, as Harry grabs the bottom of his loose tshirt and pulls it up, trailing kisses on Louis’ torso.

“I don’t mean it,” Harry says, biting experimentally with his teeth on the thin skin of Louis’ side, which shows that he _very much means it,_ what a liar, because it makes Louis whimper again, distracted and suddenly finding words drifting further out of reach.

“You’re just so quick, most of the time,” Harry says, “It’s a pleasure to find a way to slow you down.”

Louis has a thousand good retorts to that, he knows he does, but he can’t get them out past the twisting of his mouth, which has fallen open as Harry tucks his fingers into the waist of his sweatpants and pulls them off, trails slow and firm touches down the tender backs of Louis’ thighs.

It burns a little, the unfamiliarity of touch. Louis is embarrassed by how impactful it is to even feel just the trace of Harry’s fingers. Or he would be if he could spare the brain cells for it, but he’s wrapped up in the depths of it, and Harry’s smiling at him, yet another smile for Louis to catalogue. Louis files it hazily into his memory forever: Harry, in the moonlight coming through the far window of the bedroom, his eyes half-closed, his focus on absolutely nothing in the world but Louis, like this is special, surprising, important, this thing he’s stumbled onto on no-name farm on a no-name road. 

“I like you too,” Harry says.

By the time they get all the way down to naked, it feels like it’s been hours, mouths raw and blood pounding from long kisses. Yet it’s perfect, tender and somehow comforting, like what they both needed was the infinite warmth of this slowness. Harry is a revelation of gorgeousness, and Louis tells him as much, tracing over the secret ink over his hipbone, the long muscles of his thigh, kissing over his ears and nose just to make him laugh more. 

“What do you want?” Louis asks, when they’re pressed up together and he’s able to let go of exploring Harry’s mouth. He’s mostly asking because he can’t answer that kind of question himself, wanting so many different things at the same time and also _just this_ feeling somehow enough, overwhelming, even. Harry’s hard against him, his breath short, his face so beautiful to look at. Louis wants to get him off with his hands or his mouth, wants to hold him close and see how far they can get just with weight and friction, wants to curl his fingers into the soft skin of Harry’s hips forever.

He wants Harry to stay. But that’s far too much to ask, so he’ll drown in this moment as deep as he can.

“Everything,” Harry says, devastatingly unabashed. “Can’t I have everything? You already let me feed all your animals and steal your dogs,” 

Louis gasps a little bit as Harry kisses messily up the side of his neck, claws into his lower back.

“We can _share_ the dogs,” Louis says. Although Simon might be a lost cause. Understandable.

Harry shoves his way further down on the bed, which has the bad effect of relieving pressure right where Louis wants pressure but then the very good effect of bringing Harry’s mouth close to Louis’ groin, his hot tongue licking out and making Louis flinch a little with the unexpected sensation. 

“Or that,” Louis says, “Sure.” It sounds brazen enough but he's shaking.

He _feels_ Harry grin, feels Harry hold the back of his thighs to keep Louis in place on the bed. They’re fairly equally matched, Louis farm-strong and Harry tall and muscled but surprisingly pliant--but it’s like a switch, the way Harry’s rolled him onto his back and decided to _take._ Louis feels weak in the best way, with it, soft and held. Harry goes down on him with surprising grace, or maybe it’s not surprising at all, because of course Harry would be a contradiction of innocence and sharp honesty and also _really fucking good at this._ His mouth is unhurried, slick heat and tenderness over Louis’ cock, fingers digging into Louis’ thighs and inching into the intimate interior skin of his legs.

 _Trickster god,_ Louis thinks suddenly, the image of Harry in his silks, sleeping in Louis’ barn like the bait in a trap. He doesn't care. Spring comes every time, when you least expect it. 

Harry puts pressure on Louis’ cock, makes a noise that's half reassuring and half mortifying, like this is something he's wanted forever. Louis absolutely cannot take this for very long, not when he’s burning up with the desire to throw this all back at Harry, to surround him with every kind of attention that has nothing at all to do with the way he looks and everything to do with the way that Louis can make him _feel._  

“Let me,” Louis says, gasping against his own inability to form words, as Harry brings him dangerously close to the edge. Louis tugs at Harry’s hair, writhes a little bit under his hold, but manages to get out from under it.

“Let me, let me, too,” Louis repeats, like a mindless refrain, pushing Harry back and feeling desperate for it. Maybe it’s too much, too suddenly, to feel like the focus and the center of the storm.

Harry looks at him, holds Louis still for a moment. His cheeks are flushed, lovely and still eager, but checking in.

“Hey,” Harry says, “Hey, ok?”

Louis ducks his chin down to his chest and then looks back up, sees the moonlight in Harry’s eyes. “Ok,” he affirms, “Totally ok, just a lot.”   

Harry nods back. It’s a tender moment, delicate, like a drop of ice melting into water, hanging off a new leaf.

Louis feels like he’s still holding back right over the precipice, dangerously close to the edge after such a long time without the intoxicating touch of another person. But he wants this to last, wants to soak up every second of this night and wants so badly to map out every feeling that he can pull out of Harry, untangle the pieces of him that seem so certain he has to _earn things_. So he kisses Harry’s nose and then pulls away, wills his heartrate down while he finds a bottle of lube in his bedside table and rolls back to find Harry watching him, looking wanting and hard and like a walking dream. 

“Can I,” Louis says, and the way Harry smiles is another permission.

He slides a wet finger against Harry’s skin at the same time as he kisses deep into Harry’s mouth again, tongue slow and gentle, pressing into Harry’s teeth until he opens his mouth slightly with a gasp. Harry’s got his eyes shut but Louis doesn’t, Louis _can’t,_ because he wants to watch every tremor in Harry’s eyelashes, wants to see the flare in his nose when Louis pushes him back, holds himself up on his elbow to get a better angle. Louis drags his hand over the curve of Harry’s tailbone, the beautiful skin of his ass. Harry breaths fast and shallow, caught on the anticipation and so close that it almost feels like they could crawl into each other.

Touching Harry is a revelation, over and over. It’s surreal, all the familiar homey things around them and yet this gorgeous boy in his bed. Louis can feel the familiar clean flannel fabric of his sheets underneath his arm, can kiss Harry into the overstuffed pillow that Louis has fallen asleep with his face smashed into so many nights alone. He fingers Harry, deep and careful and tender, and listens to the throaty, lovely voice of his pleasure, echoing in the big farmhouse bedroom. Harry’s achingly hard against Louis’ stomach, grinding into him with helpless want. 

“Easy, city boy,” Louis teases, as if he's got any right.

Harry presses a kiss into Louis’ mouth, eyes fluttering open. They’re so dazed and black that Louis feels lost in them, that it halts his movement even as Harry protests the torture of their grinding movement. He gets a hand to Louis’ cock, forces another whimper from Louis’ throat, leans in even closer, filthy and eager and sweet.

“You should fuck me,” Harry says.

“You’re the guest,” Louis says. 

Harry pulls Louis’ hair for that, and _hard,_ as Louis rolls over to get a condom. Which, fair enough. 

Fucking Harry feels like everything else with Harry, which is to say, it makes a rising tide of carefulness fill up Louis’ chest, so monumental that it’s hard to even breath. Louis moves slowly until Harry pushes back, impatient and bold, grabs Louis’ hand to crush it down to the bed, and then it’s ok because they’re moving _together,_ deep and tight. Louis is staggered by the feeling of it, unable to control the babbling praise and foolish words coming out now, mouthing over the back of Harry’s neck. His hands go everywhere until he closes one on Harry’s cock and wraps the other around Harry’s chest, holding him firm against the movement. Harry moans. Louis can feel nothing but Harry, the sweat and heat of him, the brush of his hair against Louis’ nose, and the shudder of his body in the bed. Harry’s cock is slick in his hand, thrusting into his tight fist.

It’s fantastic, dirty and tender and suddenly frantic, like neither of them can take much more suspense. Louis can feel the build of inevitable orgasm whip down his spine, undoing all defensiveness with its chemical rush. It feels dangerous, unguarded, the big lonely heart inside his chest pounding on the outside, in time where Harry shudders in his arms.

“Harry,” he says, incoherent.

“I’ve got you,” Harry says, which is probably the thing that Louis should be saying but he can’t, and Harry’s everything around him and pulling him under, and yet it’s like the mad joy of a spring storm, exultant and unstoppable. They fall into it together, down and down.

  
***

 

The morning dawns without a single annoying alarm. Louis cracks a tentative eye, feels his ears come back online and onguard, waiting for the clanging sounds of 70s synthpop or whatever he’d set the alarm for.

But there’s nothing, just a quiet chirping outside the window. Louis can see the scalloped white ceiling of his bedroom. There’s the huffing noise of Harry’s breathing, slow and a little bit snuffly. Louis smiles reflexively. Harry might be about to get the traditional post-lambing cold, a gift from late nights and cold snapping springs. They can make tea together.

 _Harry._ Louis opens both eyes. He sits straight up in bed. 

“ _Grrrphsmmmm_ ,” Harry says.

“Oh, my god,” Louis whispers. He feels the gratifying burn in his thigh muscles, and remembers-- _fuck,_ wow. Harry’s still here, still in his bed, still real.

“Are you all right?” Louis asks slowly, somehow hoping it conveys enough casual detachment that it's fine if Harry doesn't want to talk about it, just wants to get dressed and get out. _He's going back to the city today,_ Louis realizes dully. Which of _course._ It's where people like Harry belong.

Harry pulls Louis back down, throwing his unfairly long arms around Louis’ shoulders and rolling on top of him.

“I'm so all right,” Harry says. He runs his hand up Louis’ back possessively.

All right, so _today_ isn't quite here yet.

“Worst bed and breakfast guest _ever,”_ Louis says to Harry’s face, sleep-scrunched and full of pillow lines. Harry makes a face, and bites Louis’ lip. 

“Hi,” he says around it. Louis kisses him, a little hesitant, but as Harry leans fully into the kiss, he sighs, happy and sleepy and willing to let this be real, for at least as long as it can be.

“Hi,” Louis whispers back.

“I had a thought while I was sleeping,” Harry says. It’s early still, Louis’ body clock waking him up as soon as the sunrise hits the window. The air in the bedroom is pleasantly chilly, so they’re burrowed under the comforters.

“What’s that,” Louis says, tracing over one of Harry’s tattoos. He wonders if they get photoshopped out of photos, wonders what they're for, but he also has no urgency to find out. Harry is tilted in toward Louis' hands, absurdly pretty, the kind of angles and proportions that photoshop couldn't cheat. Louis is already planning a good breakfast. French toast. Bacon. It’s amazing that Harry’s here, _again_ , in the light of day. Louis wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling like Harry’s a strange sprite that appeared in the barn, like it’s a miracle that he stays solid in sunlight.

Then again Harry’s _hand_ is feeling solid enough, and the push of his leg where it hinges Louis’ thighs apart, dangerous and seductive.

“It’s easier if I show you,” Harry says.

 

***

 

“Do you want more eggs,” Louis asks later, still wrung-out from the way that they took each apart. He’s dazed, maybe. It’s morning, and there’s a ticking clock in his brain saying that he’s got to--that there’s a closing door, that Harry’s going through it and leaving the farm and Louis on the other side of it. What can you do? Get breakfast, Louis supposes.

Harry shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. He pulls Louis closer, despite the fact that they’re both a little sweat-sticky, that they should be getting up, showering, taking Harry's overpriced luggage down to the kitchen and waiting by the drive.

Louis sighs. He can be good about this, he can. 

"All right?" Harry asks quietly. 

"Absolutely," Louis says. "Nice to have this, you know?" 

"I do know," Harry says. "Hey, we have two new lambs in the barn, what are we gonna name them?"

"Ah I already thought of that," Louis says promptly. "Tegan and Sara." 

Harry laughs, into the top of Louis' head, a little loud in his ear but Louis still grins. He can feel his whole body melt against Harry's warmth,  _god,_ it's been a very long time since he's gone multiple rounds with somebody and after a lambing, too, it's a wonder he isn't just loopy. He can already feel in the air that the cold snap ended, late last night in the middle of the lambing. It's warm now, a proper spring day, and there's a thick shaft of sunlight coming in the window. They should pull the hammock out and put it up on the big climbing tree--they should take a picnic to the creek and Louis can teach Harry how to watch for the tiny animals that live in it--they should spend a whole afternoon playing fetch with Simon and Garfunkel, lazing on the porch. 

There’s a slack in all the farm work after a lambing. It’s exhausting and sometimes brutal to go through the spring cycle, Louis had learned that in his first year. But the morning after the very last lambing, it’s like the whole farm exhales.

“I kind of want to stay in bed with you as long as we can manage,” Harry says in a low whisper.

Louis closes the space between them to find Harry’s mouth. They’ve stuffed a hundred thousand kisses into this one night and it’s possible that this is ridiculous. Louis is grownup, he can let an intoxicating stranger go. But maybe not yet.

“Ok,” he says, into Harry’s mouth, “You’re the guest.”

 

***

 

Harry's sitting on the steps alternating between feeding Simon bacon and feeding himself a breakfast sandwich. Louis is watching them even though bacon is strictly forbidden, but Louis is  _weak._ And maybe if he lets Harry feed Simon whatever he wants, he'll stop looking at the stupid luggage on the step below him, stop wondering whether he should give Harry his number, like there's any path forward from this strange one day and two nights _._ Louis was right and it's a warm day, a golden day, light breeze rustling through the giant Ash tree and more green than Louis thinks there was even just hours ago.  _Grew up in Harry's footsteps, maybe._

And then the sleek black car pulls up in the driveway. 

Louis can feel the pit of his stomach fall away before the man even gets out. He looks exactly like Louis remembers that kind of guy looking: put together, focused, a jaw muscle working like that's the only part of his body ever allowed to express everything. He's in a charcoal suit and Louis wonders for a quick and distracted minute who wakes up at five in the morning to drive out to the farms and thinks, "full suit, orange power tie, that'll show 'em." This guy, apparently. 

Simon whines. 

"Harry," the guy says, "What the _devil,_ Harry. What is this place, could you have picked a more inconvenient place?" 

"Morning, welcome to the farm, I guess," Louis says. 

"Mark," Harry says without moving, hesitation in his voice. He's got a hand on Simon's neck, and Simon isn't happy that there's a stranger, but he's doing ok. Harry looks like he's gearing up for something. He's wearing another worn-out pair of Louis' jeans because they've already been to the barn to check on Tegan and Sara, and he doesn't look like any kind of movie star. 

Mark stares at the whole tableau. And then he shakes his head, like  _who the fuck even cares._ "Get in the car, we've got a long drive back and an interview tonight, which you'd better believe, I nearly killed someone to reschedule." 

"Mark, I'm sorry about all this, I'm sorry I bolted without telling you first, but I--I think I might need this."

Louis catches his breath, but Mark doesn't. Mark Galthis rolls his eyes, strides forward to the porch, and gives Louis a once-over that makes Louis' entire back go rigid. But that's it, isn't it. The real world come barreling down the road with three V-6s and everything that made Harry's face go hard and masklike. 

"And this must be Louis," Mark says. "Charming, your newfound farmer friend? Don't be a fucking tool, Harry. Don't be naive. Get in the car and we'll get you whatever you need, and we can just forget about this." 

It's that face that does it. Or maybe it's Simon and Garfunkel, fixing Harry's manager with a death glare, because dogs always know, don't they?

Louis pushes off the brick wall of his kitchen steps and folds his arms, stance wide and challenging. 

"Are you sure you want to go back to the city with this ass, Harry? Harry can do what he wants, can't he? What the fuck have you been managing, if you haven't been managing _how he's doing?"_  

Mark's barely glanced at him but now he does, fixes Louis with a calculating stare.

"Lou, it's ok," Harry's starting, and Louis means to let him go, he really does, knows he doesn't have a claim over anything or even a foothold in Harry's world anymore, but he's never stood for a bully. 

"It's not ok," Louis says, "And you should know it's not ok. Famous and important and whatever, fine, but those things in the papers? How did those get there? That's not happening for everybody, and it shouldn't be happening to you." 

"What are you doing," Mark says to Harry, in a tone of barely-pretended patience. "What the fuck do you even think you're doing? You know where we are. You know how hard it was to get you here, and how lucky you are. Don't fucking blow it, Harry. For what, for this?" 

He waves a hand at Louis, and Harry's mouth goes thin and pressed together. "You let this farmer turn your head?"   
  
"This really isn't about me," Louis says. 

"Then why the  _fuck_ are you talking?" Mark cuts in. 

"Wait, come on," Harry says, the stress written all over his gentle face and Louis  _hates it,_ hates whoever taught him that he shouldn't get to feel angry for the world taking everything it could get from him, and more than it should have.

"This isn't about me," Louis repeats, "This isn't about anything with us, but. If--I dunno, Harry, if you need somewhere to stay, you've got that. Between me and Jacob, and even Liam, whatever. You've got lots of places to stay." 

"Isn't about you?" Mark looms toward him, or looms as much as he can without Simon getting up to his feet and looking as threatening as Simon has ever looked. Normally, Louis wouldn't let him, but this is far from normal. 

"I'm sure this is fun for you,  _Harry Styles,_ managed to drag him out to your godforsaken farm. But Louis  _Tomlinson--"_ And Louis flinches at the unexpected name, at the light of smug gotcha in Mark's eyes--"I know who you are. I don't know what your game is, but I know who you are. I was willing to play ball on the phone with you earlier but you--you don't get a thing from us now." 

"Tomlinson?" Harry asks. 

"Like the media empire, Tomlinson," Mark says, and Louis has to close his eyes for a second, startled from the crashing of the world in on the farm. "Like the record label, like the telecommunications. Oh what, little farmer boyfriend didn't tell you? Louis Tomlinson, the one who ran away? Of course he's trying to get you to do the same thing. The one who couldn't hack it even when he was given all the fucking money in the world. What's this, cute little pretend farm where you steal movie stars out to pasture? Of course. Grow up, Harry. Everybody wants something from you. Might as well at least go back to the place where you have the most control." 

He's grabbed Harry's arm, and pulled him upright, and Harry's let him. 

"This isn't about me," Louis repeats, because there's not really time to explain or say anything else but he wants Harry, at least, to leave with this--"This is about you, Harry, about what you want." 

But Harry's already halfway to the car, his face frowning and puzzled, his gaze skittering over the farm like he's trying to put it all together, like he's a leaf caught up in the inertia of all the wind around him, pulling him back into the vortex, back to the city.  _Just, wait. Just give yourself time,_ Louis wants to say, but he hasn't got the right. 

Harry leaves, and Louis realizes he never even gave Harry his phone number.

 

 ***

 

"Thank you," Louis says to Agnetha, who's curled up against his ribcage with the underside of her jaw resting on his stomach. She's a very good lamb, fuzzy and tiny and like a heat-lamp. He's laying on the stone floor of the barn, and he's made a ring of haybales to block off the first part so that he can let the lambs out. "I appreciate this, you know. Even though I see you trying to eat my shirt."  

There's a noise. The scratching of the door, and Louis stills on the floor, wonders if he can throw a feed bucket--

"Louis?" It's  _Harry._

"You came back," Louis says, arms full of lamb and face definitely turning on him again, twisting up with hope, with unexpected happiness. 

Harry looks nervous and a little confused and dazed. "I might have, I dunno, might have totally ruined my career," 

"Nah," Louis says, sitting up and adjusting Agnetha on his knees. "Grab a lamb." 

Harry laughs. He's dragging his luggage behind him, and he's tucked his hair behind his ears and his smile is getting bigger by the minute. 

“Louis Tomlinson,” Harry says.

Louis thinks he knows where this is going and makes a _what can you do_ face. “That’s me.”

“You’re rich,” Harry says. "What the hell, Louis. I should've thought something wasn't adding up, about a rescue farm. Who can run a rescue farm and never sell anything?"  

“Well,” Louis says, placatingly.

“There’s a _hospital_ named after you,” Harry says, stabbing his finger accusingly through the air. “Oh, god, I was _born_ at that hospital!”

“Not after me, after my dad, god, how old do you think I am?” Louis splutters. “There is a veterinary school named after me,” he adds after a moment’s consideration. “But that’s really not a very big deal.”

"It was just a little bit of a shock," Harry says. But he steps over the hay bale, leaves his fancy-and-now-dirty luggage at the barn door, and sinks onto the stone floor just inches away from Louis, to smile at him. "But then I was in the car and I felt, sick, you know, to leave." 

"Look at your lamb godchildren, can't miss that," Louis says. Tegan and Sara are tiny and precious, being taught to gallivant by Benny in the corner. Tegan has a nose that's coming in black, and Sara has spots along all four of her legs. 

"I don't want anything from you," Louis says. "I only didn't tell you because I don't love talking about it." 

"I know that, or I did after a minute," Harry says, softly and gently. "I was so caught up in--and it's overwhelming, walking out of the thing everybody says you should be so grateful for." 

"I know that," Louis says. Echoes. They smile at each other again, awkward on the edges but still so, so ok.

"I'd like to hear about it sometime," Harry says carefully. Louis nods. It's a long story, but it's  _his_ story. Liam could bring the baking chocolate and Louis could tell it while he remakes the ganache, everybody in Louis' kitchen. Zayn has a story too. Harry has a story, even if he doesn't know quite was it is yet, and Liam has a story Louis knows but would like to hear again. It would be good, he thinks, to tell his story. It's one of the things big farm kitchens are good for. 

Agnetha gives a happy bleat, rolls over onto her side to snuggle up against Harry. She's an incorrigible little woolly monster. 

"You _sweater_ ," Louis whispers. Harry laughs at him, eyes bright and searching. 

"Didn't want to miss them, my lambs growing up, right? Jacob said I could stay. Jacob said I could stay as long as I needed, weeks ago when I called him." 

"Yeah?" Louis asks. Kitchen visions depend on it. All sorts of visions depend on it, but spring gods get to make their own choices, so he doesn't put any pressure into it at all. 

"Yeah," Harry says, tickling Agnetha's ear.

Harry thumbs over the charm from his luggage, the heart. He's carrying it in his hand, clutching it along its gilt edge. Louis doesn't know its significance but he wants to. Wants to sit Harry down with tea, wants to learn about the places he's been with that luggage. 

But he doesn't want a fantasy. So Louis sighs, and looks Harry straight in the eye. 

“I've got to mend a fence today. And after that, I'll probably muck out the barn. And Agnetha's cute but she'll need a hoof treatment, and so do the other lambs, because Jacob's stupid ram was a carrier for some shit infection. And they're fine but it's mundane work, holding lambs in a soak bucket every hour for a week. And Garfunkel needs a pill for his knee inflammation and he won't take it unless you hold him in your lap and pet him for forty minutes, making sure he swallows it. And--”

“And the chickens,” Harry interrupts. Eyes sparkling. “And the rabbits, they needed nails clipped you said,”

“And the _god damn chickens,”_ Louis wails. “It's a rescue farm. It's a lot of work. It's not all, all, makeouts and cuddles and like,” he gestures wordlessly between them and Harry follows the gesture with that nose-wrinkle smile, _how dare--_ “It's real, out here.”

Harry takes his hand. Plucks it right out of the air, holds it like he's got all the right to it. Still smiling.

“Yeah, see I'm counting on it. Mending the fence,” he says. “You say you've got to finish mending the fence. Will you show me how? I could use it, I think. I could use learning how to fix things.”

“If you want, I mean, if you really--” Louis says. When was a lambing season anything but wild?

“Care?” Harry said, turning Louis’ hand over, kissing the tips of his fingers. From anyone else the gesture would be strained, bizarre. Well it's still bizarre, but Harry _owns_ it. Owns everything he walks into, Louis thinks, from the way that Agnetha is still pressed up against Harry's thigh, the way the lambs follow him around the pasture. _Panpipes,_ Louis thinks, _like the city thought it could ever keep you._

“If you promise you're gonna buy sensible clothes,” Louis says. Harry won't let go of his hand, and Louis isn't making him.

“I promise,” Harry says. Louis gestures again, toward the barn and the lambs and the fields and the spring coming in like a flood.

“Well then. I'll show you.”

**Author's Note:**

> //[fic post for this!](https://helloamhere.tumblr.com/post/178738753823/lambing-season-by-helloamhere-24k-shut-up)  
> //


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